


Tinderbox (or: A History of Fire in Colonial New Orleans)

by Emileesaurus



Category: Interview With the Vampire (1994), Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Sharing, Bonding, Character Study, Conversations, Emotional Manipulation, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Historical, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, New Orleans, Overtures Toward Personal Growth, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-08-20 05:22:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20222497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emileesaurus/pseuds/Emileesaurus
Summary: 1794. Pointe du Lac lies in ashes. Lestat, desperate to keep Louis with him at any cost, tries something he's never tried before: he talks.





	1. September 20, 1794

**Author's Note:**

> This fic features canon-typical themes, including but not limited to suicidal ideation and mutual emotional manipulation (both intentional and otherwise). This is a love story, but full healthy consent between spiteful vampires who refuse to communicate is difficult under the best of circumstances. Proceed with that knowledge in mind.
> 
> The story relies on the chronology of the novel, which is a little different from the film. A brief recap, in case it's been a while: as Pointe du Lac burned, Louis and Lestat fled to the nearby Freniere plantation to shelter during the day. For some time, Louis had been secretly advising the woman who ran the plantation after the death of her brother, claiming to be an angel. Disaster predictably struck. The following night, now believing him to be from the devil, she hurled a lantern at Louis to destroy him; Lestat put the fire out, Louis narrowly stopped him from killing her, and they both fled to New Orleans.
> 
> This chapter opens in their hotel suite. They've just arrived. In the book, a grief-stricken Louis goes out to hunt, finds Claudia, and has his first real taste of human blood in years.
> 
> Here, things go a little differently.

"Why did you save me?"

The question had tormented Louis since they'd fled the burning wreckage of the plantation house at Pointe du Lac. Twice in as many nights, he had been ready to embrace the pyre, and twice Lestat had plucked him from the waiting arms of death as though he alone had claim on Louis's soul.

"You're a fool, Louis." Lestat sat sprawled in an armchair in their newly-rented suite, illuminated by a candle that flickered on the low table between them. He said the words the same way he always did. Mocking. Inscrutable. And tired, now. 

They were both so tired that Louis almost couldn't muster up the will to despise Lestat, and in its absence what he felt was an exhaustion and despair that seemed to be the very marrow of his bones. He lay where he'd first collapsed on the velvet sofa, pain coursing through him from the oil burns splashed across his chest, healing too slowly to see. But even that seemed inconsequential, as though the pain belonged to someone else, and Louis was merely watching from a distance.

"I wanted to die," Louis said, pressing his cool hand against his closed eyes. His palm still stank of soot and cellar dust. "I tried to die. You should have let me die." His voice threatened to break. It felt as though he was pleading with Lestat, but for what? To kill him? To leave him? To let him go into the sun? Did he even have the courage to do such a thing, or would he falter like he had when he was mortal? 

Dawn was so near, and the shutters were thrown wide over the city. Soon the sky would swell violet with morning, and he would have to find his coffin, unless, unless… perhaps if he were far from here, perhaps if there were no soft earth to dig into, perhaps then he would have the conviction to finally end this madness.

"You're delirious. You're starving. You don't understand what you're babbling about." Lestat's voice, closer. He'd risen to his feet, and those were the wooden thuds of his tall boots upon the floor, sounds Lestat only made because he liked to make them. Louis knew this without thinking. "I can't stand the sight of you lying there like that! You're a vampire, not some wounded beast wailing to be put out of its misery! You need to hunt."

"Why?" Louis snapped wretchedly. "So I can wake up tomorrow night and do all of this with you again? And the next night, the very same, and the next, and the next, on like this forever, until the world crumbles into dust around us! I wasn't meant for this, Lestat. I can't bear it. To think I might aspire to be like you, always hungry, never satisfied, nothing more than a mindless appetite with the face of an angel!"

He curled into himself, recoiling from the immediacy of his own startling anger. The back of the settee cradled his shoulders and the miserable curve of his spine. "No angel," Louis murmured, not caring whether Lestat could hear at all. "I want to die; I don't deserve life, not when I was made to be the cause of so much death. I want to die, and if I don't have the courage to do that, then at least I can leave you. At least I can do that. I can't stand it anymore, Lestat, I can't bear the thought that this is all there is for us."

Could he be alone? He didn't know. The thought was terrifying, for as often as he'd sworn that he could leave. But surely anything was better than this existence. What were they to each other now? What could possibly exist between the two of them but a hollow mockery of what might have been, if only they hadn't been so completely at odds from the start? 

He shuddered as the realization struck him: no creature on earth would ever know him the way Lestat could have. Despair threatened to swallow him whole. Impossible, to look into those gleaming grey eyes and think of anything but the man Lestat could never be, and suffer for how bitterly they'd disappointed each other.

_ Kill me_, he thought relentlessly, like a prayer, _kill me, put an end to your terrible mistake, Lestat, and free us both… _

But of course Lestat didn't kill him. Nothing had ever been that simple between them.

"You're torturing yourself," Lestat told him, once he'd finally fallen quiet long enough. He sounded matter-of-fact, the way he often did when explaining Louis's countless vampiric failings to him, and that was worse than anger. Sometimes Lestat could sound so patient, so nearly gentle that it rattled Louis to the core. As though it didn't matter at all that Louis wasn't meant for this life Lestat had given him. As though his falling short of expectations was only expected. Lestat always remained so infuriatingly confident in himself—and by extension, overconfident in Louis, no matter what a disaster his teachings had been. Was he blind to it, or did he simply not care? The gentleness, the kindness, the uncharacteristic patience always felt like one more cruel joke Lestat was playing on him. And it never did last.

Lestat's voice was close now, very close, and Louis felt his shadow settling upon him as Lestat passed in front of the candle flame. "You're torturing yourself," he repeated, in that same gentle tone that Louis couldn't stand. "You've been torturing yourself for years." The weight of time felt suddenly immense, laden with all that had already passed, and stretching, barren, toward countless bleak centuries ahead of him. "You're starving, and you're weak, and now you've finally seen the indisputable proof of it for yourself: there's no going back to that world you dream of, no watching them live their little lives from the shadows and deluding yourself into believing that can truly be enough."

Louis let his hand drop from his eyes, and light and Lestat filled his vision, his smooth face the very picture of some awful, inhuman sympathy. How could any living creature look at once so anguished and uncaring? It seemed to Louis as if his plight moved Lestat terribly, and yet his acting to stop it would have been unthinkable.

Lestat inclined his head toward Louis, his expression searching, as though he were trying to read Louis's mind like one of his mortal victims. Sometimes Louis felt sure that his every thought was written inside him like the pages of a book for Lestat to flip through and discard as he pleased. Most nights it made him feel exposed; tonight, Louis hardly knew his own mind.

In that same gentle, awful voice, Lestat went on. "And now you know the truth, don't you? What I've been trying to tell you all along."

"I've learned too many truths these last two nights," Louis said wearily. "Which one is that?"

"That you are what you are. There's no place for you with them now, not the kind you tell yourself you want. Their rules don't matter anymore, don't you see? You could have been one of God's angels in all your righteous glory, and it wouldn't have mattered to her. Their world is theirs alone. They don't  _ want _ to live with things like us." 

Stricken as he was, Louis couldn't find the words to protest, and was left to wrestle silently with what he feared might have been another of Lestat's unbearable lessons. 

Lestat sighed, and something seemed to change in him, though what, Louis didn't know. Perhaps some tension in his full brow, or a darkening of his gaze. Or perhaps the way he pressed his lips together tightly as he looked at Louis's raw and wounded chest, where the charred and ragged edges of his shirt were soaked with his blood. The exposed flesh glistened an ugly pink, and here and there blood seeped in a thin trickle at the surface. Louis had half forgotten his own pain until Lestat's attention fell upon it. Now he nearly felt aflame again, as though his eyes alone could burn Louis to cinders.

Louis inhaled slowly, and the rise of his chest seemed to trouble Lestat in some way. He realized only then that he hadn't been breathing.

"Here's the proof of it," Lestat said, gesturing at Louis's misery with a subtle and elegant wave that made him wince. "You reckless, sentimental creature." Sympathy made his voice into something unfamiliar. That, too, felt cruel. "You really hoped she'd love you back?"

Louis made a quiet sound, and let his eyes fall shut again. Had he wanted that? If he'd been a mortal man, perhaps he might have felt the sorts of things that mortal men were meant to feel for mortal women. But what was that love to him now? He tried to imagine feeling it for her, replacing his intense but distant tenderness with intimacy. The thought seemed blasphemous. 

"I thought I could undo... this," he explained in quiet distress, only coming to the understanding of it as he was speaking the words. "I know it sounds foolish, I know it sounds vain, but I did. If she truly believed I was an angel, if I could find a way to save her from destruction, then I… I thought…" He shook his head. He trailed off. He didn't know.

"You thought…?"

Lestat's hand, startlingly warm, covered his where it lay curled upon the cushion, and when Louis's eyes flew open he appeared utterly compassionate. Had he ever looked like this since Louis had come to him? Louis couldn't think of a time, and his instinct was to jerk away. 

Or, rather, what he thought his instinct should have been was to jerk away.

Instead he let Lestat curl those long fingers around his own, feeling miserable and baffled by the simple sense of comfort that it instilled in him, and the horrible knowledge that Lestat was the only creature in this world who it could come from. Because the awful fact was that Lestat was right. He always had been right. What else could Louis expect out there? A world of fearful whispers and suspicious looks, unless, like Lestat, he could bear to linger in the company of doomed mortal victims. For what mortals but their victims could ever truly know them?

His thoughts swirled, hazy as smoke in lamplight, but his hand remained beneath Lestat's, neither moving away nor returning the gesture. He tried not to wonder what Lestat was thinking, though he knew, as always, that the ache in him would only deepen with the attempt.

The candle flame guttered, and light danced on Lestat's features, and for a moment he could have been nothing more than a beautiful young mortal man. Again came that sickening near-regret. He'd died so young, thought Louis at the same remove he felt from the throbbing in his chest; had he sold his life for power, or for freedom, or was he, too, seduced by something he hadn't fully understood? And if so, why had he then returned to the old man he resented so terribly? That mortal boy who'd lost his books and his monastery was years dead now, and all that was left of him was this bitter, vicious monster. 

This monster who still loved the father who'd taken that from him. 

"I thought I could do good," Louis whispered, ashamed to the core of how completely futile it all sounded now. "I thought I could _be _ good." Lestat's eyes blazed silver and gold in the candlelight, and Louis held them, wracked with such anguish that he felt he'd crumble if Lestat looked away now. "Haven't you ever wanted that, Lestat?" 

Silently, he begged:  _ please understand me. Please. For all I know now, you're the only creature under God who could possibly know how this feels, and I can't bear to be alone in this. _

Louis's palm turned upward, finally, where it lay beneath Lestat's, and he was startled by the urgency with which Lestat responded, tangling their fingers together with a clumsiness that was surely Louis's own fault. He stared with wide eyes at their white hands laying palm to palm, Lestat gripping his so tightly that Louis couldn't help but hope he understood. 

He hadn't been this close to Lestat since the night he'd died. Not in any way that mattered. The moment felt suspended, hushed, as though he might shatter it by speaking or acting too rashly. Perhaps Lestat felt the same, despite the impulsiveness that ruled his every action; perhaps that was the reason for the agony of indecision in his expression. 

Louis's heart was racing, and he no longer felt outside himself, but fully present. He was wounded, and aching, and desperately lonely, and he could hear his own blood in his ears and feel Lestat's pulse against his palm, and he didn't want to let go. He needed this connection, whatever it was, as powerfully as he'd felt the urge to die. He needed to know someone else understood. Even if that someone was only Lestat.

It was Lestat who acted first, lifting his free hand between them, fingers tugging roughly at the knot of his cravat. Louis's fingers tensed against Lestat's, his whole body riveted to that sight. It was as though in some instinctive way he knew what Lestat intended to do, even as his mind refused to form the thought. The white silk was stained here and there with ash and smoke—oh, how Lestat would hate to see the state of it, he always kept his expensive clothing so pristine—and beneath it, as the layers were unwound and pulled aside, his smooth skin seemed to glow. 

He'd fed downstairs. He'd made sure Louis was watching when he did it. And the blood was working in him now, animating him, making him into something otherworldly and impossible to resist. And there, beneath the shadow of his jaw, his pulse beat a quick and steady rhythm inside his gleaming flesh.

"Drink from me."

Louis's heart thundered in his ears as he forced himself to tear his eyes away from the incomprehensible temptation before him. He tried to look away, but Lestat was so close, kneeling in front of him, that there was simply nothing else to see. Lestat's eyes seemed to bore into him, a question burning in them that Louis couldn't possibly understand. Louis parted his lips to speak, but he made no sound, only shook his head in mute disbelief. He'd gone still as if entranced, his back pressed tightly against the sofa. His hand was still gripping Lestat's. 

He was starving. He knew that now with all the intensity of a lightning strike. He was starving, and he'd been starving for years. How had he not realized it before? The thirst was a living, demanding thing, animating him with its own force of will, making his fangs long and sharp behind his lips. Yes, he needed it. Yes, he knew it. He would be half-mad with thirst tomorrow evening if he didn't feed. And this was no murky furtive animal blood, or a torn-out mortal throat, but  _ Lestat_. 

That blood. He hadn't tasted it since the night Lestat had made him. He'd been so sure he never would again. But how many nights had he fallen into dreamlike trances, staring mystified at the pale blue web of veins that branched from beneath Lestat's lace cuffs as he longed to understand this nameless thing between them?

And now here it was, that blood from which he'd drawn his own immortal life, pulsing beneath skin that seemed as delicate and lush as the first ripe fruit of summer… oh, there was no question that he wanted it. He was seduced, caught in a current from which there was no escape, the same as he'd been that very first night. But the source, oh God, the source! Again, Louis trembled, and Lestat's look of concern darkened, surely frustrated with his tortured indecision. 

Perhaps there was a spell in it. Some magic to bind Louis to him. Or perhaps he truly was dying, and Lestat simply refused to let that happen. 

"Louis," Lestat urged, frustration creeping into his voice, and the sound of his name drew Louis out of his near panic. Lestat's eyes were bright with anxiety, and he looked as if he couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to press closer or recoil completely. He looked like someone other than himself, Louis thought, someone beautiful and vulnerable and capable of love, and that miserable yearning struck him again. It wasn't just that he disliked Lestat, Louis realized with staggering clarity. It was worse than that. He had spent years grieving for a vision of Lestat that had never been real at all.

"I'm leaving you," Louis whispered desperately. He didn't know why he was saying it. Whether he wanted Lestat to back away and spare him this awful temptation, or for Lestat to know there was no bargain being made with his acceptance, or for Lestat to talk him out of leaving entirely. 

"And I'm trying to stop you," Lestat pleaded—imagine, Lestat pleading! He shook his head, and his loose curls caught the golden gleam of the lamplight like a halo. Was it possible? Lestat, vulnerable? Lestat, needing him? The plantation was gone, Louis wanted to protest, his investments weren't worth all the pain they had inflicted on each other, but all he could muster was a faint moan, embarrassingly hungry. 

"I'll tell you anything you want to know." Lestat clasped Louis's hand between his own, and that desperate promise was as heady as the rush of his blood. "I'll answer your questions. We'll talk, I swear. I can't promise you enlightenment or understanding, but whatever I can tell you, it's yours. You can make your choice afterward. And if you still can't bear it, then…" Lestat shut his eyes, and a terrible knowing sadness seemed to pass through him like wind through grass. 

Later, Louis would think it was that expression that finally made him do it.

The hand he'd curled against his wounded chest reached out, crossing the gulf of inches between them. Slowly, slowly, until his fingertips landed as lightly as a flower petal against the hot rushing pulse in Lestat's throat. Save for the frantic beating of his heart, Lestat was perfectly still, the most exquisite anticipation etched upon his porcelain face.

Louis moved first. But it was as if that tiny motion had unchained Lestat, and suddenly Lestat was above him, a pale and glittering shadow that eclipsed the room. One of them made some desperate, breathless sound, and the other returned it, and he didn't know what it meant besides  _ yes _ and  _ please _ and  _ now _ and  _ need_. He buried a hand in Lestat's cool golden hair, dragging him down, crushing their bodies together until they were nearly one being, his nose brushing Lestat's jaw. There, he caught the mingled scents of soot and wood smoke, velvet and cellar dust and carriage horses and two-day-old cologne, but nothing at all to mark him as Lestat. Did they have no natural scent at all?

"Louis," Lestat said roughly, shuddering against him. His voice was a bolt of lightning down Louis's spine, and his blood was  _ right there _ , and Louis could smell that, could hear it, could feel it down to the very core of him, a rhythmic liquid whisper that promised this would all come to an end. 

He drove his fangs in deep.

Lestat made some low sound that rumbled against Louis's lips, and Louis moaned. The blood gushed hot across his tongue, each swallow of it warming him, filling him deeper. This was nothing like animal blood. This was an oasis, a sacred fountain, consecrated wine that poured down his throat in long and eager gulps. This was his maker, the source of his life, his own life mingled with Lestat's and flowing into him, as it was always meant to be. He could feel that steady heartbeat in him now, matching his own, becoming his own, each pounding drum an echo of his name. 

Never in his years as a vampire had Louis ever allowed himself to sate his terrible hunger, and he was helpless against the tidal force of the swoon that took him. 

Locked together, they fell outside of time.

Was it seconds? Minutes? Impossible to say. But at last, the drumming of Lestat's heart receded into its own distinct rhythm, and slowly, Louis began to return to himself. His lips still sucked at Lestat's skin, and as he withdrew his fangs, he felt Lestat gasp. It was primal; Louis was helpless to it. He made a quiet sound of need, lapping at the healing flesh until he realized what he was doing and, wincing at the wanton animal display, began to pull away. 

But with his back now reclined against the arm of the settee, there wasn't far to go. Perhaps that stopped calamity. Lestat didn't seem to register his halfhearted attempt to escape from the embrace; he simply let his forehead fall against Louis's chest, that hand still clasped just as tight between his own. He didn't seem eager to mock him for anything that had just happened, and gradually, Louis's wariness receded, replaced with a tranquility that reminded him of wine and good sleep and winter nights.

Lestat was unusually quiet for what felt like a very long time. Louis didn't mind. It was possible to forget who he was, when he wasn't talking. He stroked his fingers through Lestat's hair, not caring that it was Lestat's hair, simply lost in the sensation of silken ringlets sliding past his fingers. Everything was golden: the reflections of the candlelight that shimmered in the chandelier, the careless mass of curls beneath his hand, the blood that now raced through both their veins. 

Louis knew better than to ask what it had meant. 

But he couldn't stay silent forever, and eventually, in a soft and wondering voice, he pointed out, "You never told me we could do that."

Then Lestat did draw back, letting go of Louis's hand. The air felt very cool on his skin as Louis flexed his fingers, and he realized with a shock that the pain in his chest had vanished completely. Lestat stayed crouched beside him, arms folded on the arm of the sofa, chin pillowed atop them. His skin was paler now, but his eyes were just as sharp as he watched Louis.

"Would you have done it if I had?" Lestat asked evenly.

There was no answer Louis could have given him. He sat up a little, pulling his ruined shirt across his chest. It was hard to look away from Lestat's face, though once again Louis had the unbearable sense that he was being judged by some standard he would never understand. 

"I don't know," he finally answered. His thoughts were sluggish, meandering through the past as though his memories were pages in a book about someone else's life. He didn't even know what "it" was, really; only that when Lestat's blood had passed his lips, he'd felt a satisfaction he'd never known in all his life, and that it was already beginning to slip away from him. He wished Lestat would take his hand again. Bereft of that strange unexpected point of contact, he felt suddenly absurdly alone. "You said we could talk." 

Lestat's brow furrowed, and he let out a breath between his teeth. He seemed at war with himself again, touched with a reticence that Louis had rarely seen him display. And then Lestat said something that astonished him completely.

"Tomorrow," said Lestat. "Tomorrow night, we'll talk."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started this fic at the beginning of July, and it's taken over my life a little. You ever end up with tens of thousands of words of wish fulfillment just to contrive excuses for your OTP to talk to one another...? Anyway, I just hope you enjoy my brand of self-indulgent melodrama and longing. Part two soon.
> 
> For the curious, or those who just can't get enough of long meandering author's notes (see also: The Vampire Chronicles themselves):
> 
> This story owes an immense debt to Anne's 1992 draft of the _Interview with the Vampire_ film, clearly written when she had a gentler, post-trilogy Lestat in mind. (A .pdf is easy to find with a quick google search.) Though it takes a very different path, it planted the first seeds for many of the conversations here. I'm fonder of it than it probably deserves.
> 
> The central idea of this story, once you get past all the tortured metaphors, is that Louis's trouble with Lestat was not so much "I'm in love with you and I don't want to be" as "I'm in love with an idealized version of our relationship, and if you could just get it together for five minutes I'd probably sleep with you, but so far you haven't convinced me you aren't the literal devil."
> 
> Or, as Louis put it once: "I was thinking at that moment, wordlessly and rather deeply, how sublime friendship between Lestat and me might have been; how few impediments to it there would have been, and how much to be shared. ... Lestat, how we might have known each other, had he been a man of character, a man of even a little thought. The old man’s words came back to me; Lestat a brilliant pupil, a lover of books that had been burned. I knew only the Lestat who sneered at my library, called it a pile of dust, ridiculed relentlessly my reading, my meditations."
> 
> So here we are.
> 
> For more Emotions, hit me up on [Tumblr](https://emileesaurus.tumblr.com/).


	2. September 21, 1794

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lestat attempts to talk, and Louis doesn't like his answers.
> 
> Also, we learn some historical facts about dogs.

Louis awoke in the dark of his coffin with an anxious weight in his chest. He often woke like this, rising slowly from vivid, tormented dreams, but tonight was different; he couldn't remember any dreams at all. Only one thought occupied his mind. 

Lestat. 

Lestat was inscrutable. He seemed to thrive on it. And whatever had transpired between them last night, Louis was sure that Lestat would find a way to use it to his advantage. Perhaps he already had, and it was only a matter of time before he inevitably sprung his trap. But once again, that came to Louis at a remove. Louis found it hard to truly care what he had planned. What could Lestat do to him? It had been years. His threats seemed just as hollow as his superficial charms.

But when Louis thought of rising, of seeing Lestat in their suite waiting for him, he felt an undeniable tension. He couldn't name the source of it, anticipation or dread, only that he felt it for Lestat. 

He had said they would talk. Lestat didn't do things like that—make promises he didn't intend to keep. He tormented Louis differently.

For a long time, Louis stayed in his coffin, thinking those thoughts until they were threadbare as a well-paced rug. It might have been an hour, perhaps more, before he finally pushed the lid aside to rise. There was no clock in the room, just the sound of endless falling rain, and through the slats of the shutters the sky was as black as always.

And Lestat was not there.

But the lamps had been recently lit, and a pair of his gloves sat on the corner of the untouched bed, and there was his coffin, concealed beneath a cloth so cleverly and simply that no mortal would ever know it for what it was. The whole room looked as though he had just recently stepped out. Gone to hunt, Louis supposed, and he quickly turned from the thought. He wasn't thirsty yet himself, and he knew the reason, and that thought, too, he pushed diligently aside until it could be dealt with.

In the meantime, Louis walked about the lavish suite, able to appreciate it for the first time now that he was alone and had his wits about him. The hotel was very new, one of the many Spanish-style buildings constructed in the wake of the terrible fire that had consumed the city six years ago. The room was lovely, he had to admit, freshly wallpapered and sumptuously decorated in the elegant style that Lestat loved best. Though Louis would never have chosen this place on his own, it was impossible not to appreciate being surrounded by beauty, a fortress against the crowded, muddy streets of New Orleans.

And, attuned to himself as he was, Louis noticed a newfound clarity to his senses. He knew why. Of course he knew why. Lestat's blood still pounded in his veins, and the satisfaction in his soul from the unexpected quenching of that terrible years-long thirst was impossible to deny. But he couldn't bring himself to dwell on that, not when everything around him seemed so marvelous. The lamps gleamed so brightly they almost sang, and the tangling vines in the wine-red wallpaper danced in the golden candlelight. He could hear the lush green sound of the rain falling in the tropical courtyard below, mingling with voices from balconies and distant bells from the Ursuline convent, and past it all, the endless rolling blackness of the river. 

The door swung open, and he turned. There was Lestat, flushed from the kill, raindrops clinging to his loose-worn hair like diamonds. He seemed in a hurry, as if he'd just rushed down the hall, and now he lingered in the doorway with a strange look of surprise upon his face.

"Ah, Louis," he said, after a moment, deliberately relaxing his posture as he shut the door behind him. Affecting nonchalance, Louis noted, and badly. "I didn't expect to find you lurking about. Still planning on leaving me tonight? Have you prepared a speech for me, is that it?" He smiled, his hands splaying at his sides. "Go on then, tell me what a devil I am."

Louis didn't know what to make of his mood, but he did derive a quiet, bitter pleasure from Lestat's reaction. He knew Lestat's future depended upon him, and it was darkly satisfying to think that he might have the power to destroy Lestat's whole life with one simple act.

"You said that we could talk," Louis replied, studying Lestat.

Again, that startled look in his grey eyes, and something more that Louis couldn't read. Lestat shook his head and prowled the length of the room a few times, but his manner was more agitated than predatory. He was trapped, Louis realized. He knew he had nowhere to run. And the thought of that, that Lestat might actually  _ want _ to run from him, made no sense at all. What did he have to hide?

"You want to bleed me for knowledge and leave me with nothing, my greedy child." Lestat's voice was sweet and cruel, and it seemed an absurd farce to Louis. An actor playing a role he didn't believe in. Elegantly, he sat, reclining with an arm over the back of the settee, one long leg crossed over the other. "What do you want to know, then? It's been years. Surely you must realize there are no answers that can possibly satisfy your ceaseless need for self-inflicted misery…"

"What is my life to you?" Louis asked. He'd had so many questions in his head—questions about their nature, their kind, what they were and where they came from. The nature of their arrangement hadn't been among them. He felt his pulse rise in his throat and in his cheeks, but he steeled himself. "Twice, Lestat, you saved me from the fire. You could have let me burn. You  _ should _ have let me burn. I wanted to die, and you came back for me."

Louis shook his head. He'd only bound Lestat to him with money; that wasn't worth his life, no matter the depths of Lestat's materialism. "You could have been burned too. You could have died. For what, Lestat? For me?" His voice trembled as the full weight of his unbearable confusion came down on him. "Just tell me why."

And Lestat looked at him with that patient, disappointed expression that he knew to mean,  _ Louis, you fool. _ He lifted his hand. "Come here."

Louis nearly obeyed. What stopped him was not knowing why he wanted to. Being near Lestat was rarely tolerable, and they were both in such dark moods. They'd fight. It was Lestat. They always fought. It was only the instinctive animal need for physical comfort that made it appealing, and he wrapped his arms around himself, shaking his head in stiff refusal.

"Louis," Lestat said. Gently. Uncertainly. He sounded very unlike himself, and Louis recalled with vivid clarity the pleading in his voice when he'd begged Louis to kill his father. Louis felt something give way that he thought had been walled off. It wasn't compassion, they were too far gone for that. But some kindred sort of lonely misery, perhaps. 

So, with a sigh, Louis gave in. His body felt impossibly heavy as he lowered himself onto the sofa at Lestat's side, bending forward, resting his face against the cool darkness of his palms. Eventually, he felt Lestat shift, and seconds later, his arm settled around Louis's shoulders. And it was a comfort. Despite Lestat.

They sat like that for a long time. Thunder had begun across the river by the time Lestat finally spoke. "You really feel no tenderness for me at all."

It was as shocking and confusing as a slap would have been, and Louis didn't know whether he wanted to laugh or cry. 

"How could I?" Louis demanded, indignation rising up out of the depths of despair to stir his passion. "How could I possibly? What reason have you ever given me to feel any kind of warmth, any kind of friendship, anything at all for you but bitterness and hatred?" He let out a shuddering exhale, face still pressed against his hands. Looking at Lestat seemed impossible, and the weight of his arm seemed oppressive. "And yet here I remain. I don't understand it."

"I do," said Lestat softly. "You can't bear the thought of being alone."

It sounded like a confession.

"Yes," Louis said, finally looking up at him. "The possibility that there are no others like us, that we're the only two vampires there are…"

"And would that be so terrible? If you knew what other vampires were like, you wouldn't be so eager to track them down." It was the first time Lestat had ever spoken so definitively of other vampires. Louis stared at him, eyes wide and wondering a hundred silent questions. Lestat must have seen it in his face; he hesitated, but with a shake of his head, went on. "They're predators, Louis, superstitious killers who stalk the night alone or in their own tight-knit little groups and who'll want nothing to do with you and your romantic notions about truth and beauty and the nobility of the human nature that you cling to. They'll strike you down for what they see as weakness, or they'll spot your beauty and naïveté and make you their slave. And you'll belong to them more completely than you ever have to me, you can be sure of that." 

Again, a strange anxiety, a mixture of fascination and apprehension. A question loomed before him, inescapable. If Lestat wanted to fly into a rage or kill him for it, so be it.

"And what about the one who made you? Was he as terrible as you say all vampires are?"

Something troubled flashed in Lestat's eyes, and again, Louis had the thought that he looked trapped. His hand flew back from Louis's shoulders, but he didn't recoil any further than that. He didn't answer, either, and it struck Louis quite plainly that he didn't know  _ how _ to answer. 

Perhaps it was an unfair question.

"I can't imagine that you disappointed him," said Louis softly, that terrible quiet despair washing over him again. Lestat was powerful, and beautiful, and killed without thought or effort or guilt. He was exquisitely suited to his purpose. Louis had never been suited to anything. "You act like you were born to be a vampire. Maybe I envy it. Perhaps that's why I can't stand to watch how easily you do all the things that you say spring from our nature."

Lestat's brow furrowed. Silent seconds vanished, and he seemed to go somewhere far away and deep inside himself, until Louis began to truly fear that he'd distressed him, if such a thing was even possible.

"He was mad," said Lestat at last, in a voice that was as distant as his eyes. 

Louis's heartbeat thundered. Lestat was talking about his maker. 

"It's what often happens to the very old ones, and he was ancient. Hundreds of years old. Skeletal, monstrous, not beautiful like we are now, and dressed in ragged clothes that men had worn when he was one of them. How long he'd been like that, I didn't know, but it was clear he'd long since shed any lingering traces of humanity. He was a vampire. Completely."

Louis was stricken speechless.

"I don't know what drove him to it, exactly, except that he couldn't bear to go on living any longer with the world the way it was. I don't know what made him want an heir, or why that heir was me. He left me everything he had, and went into the pyre the night he made me. I witnessed it. A newborn. An orphan. I scattered his ashes on the wind before the dawn." Lestat looked at him sharply. "Do you understand what I'm telling you? There was no one there to guide me the way I've guided you. Everything I learned I learned myself."

"Dear God," Louis whispered. The room seemed hideously empty suddenly, and all the lovely ornaments nothing more than glittering flotsam to hide that emptiness. 

Lestat exhaled sharply, like a failed bitter laugh. "Oh, does that trouble you?" he asked, as if his mocking tone might hide the fear in his voice. "To learn that I was born knowing nothing, just as you were? That perhaps all vampires are, forever and forever, back to the very first of us, nothing more than blind children begging in the darkness for answers we'll never receive?"

Louis trembled. The thought of it was staggering, horrifying. Too immense to comprehend, like the endless fields of night in his dreams, a loneliness that spanned all of creation with no beginning and no end. It would swallow him whole. He wrapped his arms across his chest, feeling battered, feeling faint, feeling…

Startled, as Lestat took him roughly by the arms and pulled him close.

"Louis," Lestat said, his face as serious as Louis had ever seen it, "listen to me. If you've never listened to anything I've told you until now, let this be it. I'm telling you this for your own good: don't look for truth. It won't bring you peace."

"How can you say that?" Louis asked. How could anything bring him peace  _ but _ that, now? Adamant, he shook his head. "Your maker didn't tell you anything, but surely there are other vampires who could. Someone out there must know more than him. Someone must know where we came from."

"Where we came from!" Lestat rolled his eyes. "What do you really think you're asking, asking questions like that?"

"I want to know how it happened. How it first happened, and what it actually is." A thought occurred to him, and he mused on it aloud, not truly asking Lestat. "Who was the first vampire?"

Lestat scoffed. "Who was the first man?"

"Adam." He didn't give Lestat a chance to mock his answer. "Or Prometheus molded humankind from clay, or an ancient god breathed life into a tree. There are stories. Don't vampires have stories about where they came from?"

"What if they do? What if tomorrow you learned just who created us and why? Would that bring you contentment, to know you were a part of some great scheme? To know that you were born with someone else's plan to carry out?" His hands were tight on Louis's upper arms, and it felt as though Lestat was arguing past him, having this debate with someone Louis had never met. "You're free, Louis, free in ways no mortal ever dreamed. Can't you see how wonderful that is?"

"But there must be a purpose," Louis said. "Some meaning to our being what we are."

"Did your life have a purpose before? And did you know it?" Lestat shook his head. "You have the greatest adventure of your life laid out in front of you and you're desperate to be handed a set of rules."

Lestat was half right. Louis didn't love rules, he just couldn't stand uncertainty. Since he was a boy, he had always been reassured by plans and order; the idea that society had a natural hierarchy comforted him, though he'd always felt somewhat apart from it. 

"It isn't only that," he protested weakly. 

"Then what is it?"

Louis sighed, and bowed his head, turning up his palms in apology. "We're different. As different in our underlying natures as any two men can be. You burst into this life and never looked back, didn't you? I'm not like that at all. I don't know how to be. You're a wolf who freed a dog, Lestat."

Another look came over Lestat's face, one Louis couldn't begin to guess at. Amusement, darkly, mixed with something else. "Is that really how you see the pair of us?"

"I change my mind a dozen times a night," Louis admitted wearily.

Lestat's hold on him gentled, and he rubbed Louis's arms for just a moment like he was trying to reassure him. The gesture felt foreign, too intimate—something a brother might do, or a lover, or even just a friend. But against his will, Louis felt comforted by the pressure of his hands, and something deep inside of him calmed.

"We're different," Lestat agreed. Louis was relieved to hear him finally admit it in a way that didn't feel like an insult. At least, not a total insult: "I'd never have survived on rats as long as you, for one thing."

Louis opened his mouth to argue, but Lestat surprised him by smiling. 

"I mean it! I do." Lestat lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and Louis wondered at the change in his mood. Lestat's lightness always hid something awful. "You have your own kind of strength."

That admission stunned Louis completely. Had Lestat ever said anything like that to him before? He couldn't remember a time. It was the simplest acknowledgement, and yet it shook him to his very core. 

"We're terribly mismatched," Louis said in a voice barely more than a whisper. His pulse was light and quick, so that he thought his hands might shake, and he folded them together in his lap. 

Lestat withdrew, and sighed, and leaned in again, covering Louis's fingers with his own. Once again Louis felt that instinctive comfort and that heartsick urge to pull away from it. "I chose you carefully and deliberately, Louis. You mustn't ever doubt that."

_ Why_, he wanted to beg,  _ what did you see in me? _ He ached to know. If only Lestat would tell him, maybe he could see it in himself. Maybe he could find a way to be whatever it was Lestat had hoped he would become. Maybe he wouldn't be such a disappointment to them both.

"It can't be true," said Louis, desperately wanting it to be. "Whatever your reasoning, Lestat, I'm not what you imagined when you made me. We both know it."

"No," said Lestat, at length. "But I want you with me."

Louis had no idea what to say to something as honest as that. He knew it, of course, though he didn't know why. That had been the whole crux of the argument, for Lestat. But to hear him say it not as a threat, but a simple  _ I want_… well, that stopped Louis completely.

Thunder growled outside. The storm was closer. Louis pulled his hands away, fighting a misplaced instinct to apologize for doing so.

"I need to hunt," he whispered. 

Lestat gaped at him, looking between Louis and the rain-battered shutters. "Now?"

Louis's mouth became a line. He gave a tight shrug in response. He could have waited, and they both knew it. It was a cowardly, transparent attempt to exit a conversation he'd started to drown in. 

He couldn't blame Lestat if he was angry. He was angry at himself.

But Lestat said nothing, only looked at him with an anxious, troubled expression on his face. Louis watched, transfixed, as he lifted his hand toward his collar, and with a curl of heat he was thinking of last night, how Lestat's fingers had looked as he unwrapped that band of fabric from his throat and bent his head for Louis to drink his blood. Was he going to do it again, Louis wondered, was he going to ask Louis to feed on him? His veins tightened with a sudden thirst, his temples throbbing with each beat of his heart.

And Lestat adjusted his cravat, and dropped his hand as though it had been nothing, and Louis was horrified to realize he'd been thinking of it all on his own! 

Louis stood. His legs felt unsteady beneath him, though he knew it wasn't so. He was a vampire. 

Lestat had tried to make his face impassive again, but the cracks in it were obvious now. Louis couldn't bear the sight of him like that, looking up at him as though he needed something. Louis turned for the door. He had nearly made it there when quietly, Lestat asked: "Will you come back?" 

Louis's fingers tightened on the handle. He didn't turn. "Why should I?"

Lestat, predictably, said nothing in return.

Of course not. The barest scrap of purpose would have been enough, and naturally, Lestat had none to give.

* * *

The sidewalks were the shores of islands, standing tall against the damp and muddy street. Alone, he drifted like a pale shadow, past new brick-walled mansions and closed-up shops, out to where the alleyways were darker and the derelict facades of crowded tenements loomed. He walked a long time, thinking of nothing, watching mortals huddle together under the shelter of ramshackle balconies and gather to warm their hands around fires.

He longed to stand among them. His fingers ached with cold, and the rain fell until his black hair clung to his skin, and it would have been so good just to linger beside a fire and feel its heat roll over him, and to listen to them talk and drink and laugh, and to watch the infinite variety of colors in their faces as they did. 

And he wanted it all the more for knowing it was absolutely impossible. 

When he couldn't bear it any longer, when he'd stretched his thin humanity to its limits and felt it give way to his vampire nature, he dropped to his fours in an alleyway and sunk his claws into a soaked and trembling rat. The muddy feral tang of its blood against his tongue made him ache for last night's liquid gold; he sucked at it greedily, desperate to call that back to him again. But all he felt was a momentary ache of relief as its tiny heart beat its frantic dying pace and its life flowed into him forever.

And then that life was gone, and so was that second of wholeness, and he knew that it had passed—the closest thing to peace that he could feel.

His fangs were still buried in wet fur when Lestat's words came back to him.  _ I want you with me. _

He seemed to feel everything and nothing at once, like a great roaring wave knocking him over and dragging him beneath black and swirling water. With a cry, he flung the rat against the alley wall and buried his face in his hands, making low, agonized, utterly inhuman sounds as bloody tears poured down his face.

_ Let me die_, he thought again.  _ I would rather die than be this utterly alone. _

And again he heard Lestat's words, with the perfect clarity of vampire memory so that it nearly seemed that he was there with him in that dark and wretched alleyway.  _ You can't bear to be alone. _ And he knew that it was true, that Lestat was right, that he'd always been right about that. And the terrible irony of it was that Lestat was just as lonely as him.

He wept until he had no tears left, until the dampness on his face was just the rain.

Perhaps that was all this could ever be for them. Blind uncertain figures grasping for each other in the dark.

Lestat had made him. That was all he had.

And he had only death or Lestat to deliver him from this immeasurable loneliness.

A white light split the sky, and the roaring wind carried the sounds of clanging bells and slamming shutters, rusted signs creaking where they hung. The storm was over the city now, and the sharp tang of lightning burned in his nose. He'd never known lightning had a scent, when he'd been a man. 

He'd never known a thousand things like that. 

* * *

He let himself in from the balcony, as quiet as he knew how to be. It didn't matter. Lestat was there. He looked like he'd been pacing since he'd left, though Louis was sure that was wishful thinking; still, he was plainly distraught, clearly working himself up into some kind of a storm. If he was angry, Louis decided, he'd just go to his coffin. He was too tired to argue with Lestat. Too tired for everything.

But any thought of that vanished the second Lestat saw him. In an instant, Lestat was upon him, and Louis had his arms up for a fight, ready to defend himself, prepared to throw Lestat right out that open doorway if he lifted a hand against him. But it wasn't a fight, it was an embrace, and Louis was left absolutely speechless while Lestat clutched him like he hadn't seen him in years. Like he was happy to see him.

Oh, thought Louis, with wretched understanding.

He didn't have time to think about anything, really. It seemed immaterial whether he wanted to put his arms around Lestat, because Lestat had already drawn back, looking at him from head to toe, gathering his expression into one of familiar exasperated disdain.

"What am I going to do with you?"

"I wish you would tell me," Louis said softly, knowing he wouldn't.

Lestat shook his head in disgust at the state of his clothes, and his hair, and the whole sorry state of him, and his tender words vanished entirely. "Louis, Louis, Louis. You've outdone yourself tonight! I thought you'd finally gone to join the rats. Out inspiring ghost stories, no doubt! You look like you drowned in the storm and got lost on your way home, you contemptible sea-wraith, I'm half expecting starfish in your hair."

There was something perversely comforting in the barrage of insults. He liked Lestat's concern, he realized—liked that he was the one in control of it.

And he permitted Lestat to remove his wet black coat, and to unfasten the filthy cravat from around his neck—flash of shame, though blessedly Lestat said nothing of it—and he allowed him to unbutton his waistcoat and to comb his long, deft fingers gently through Louis's hair until it was smooth again. Louis permitted all this without reacting to it, wondering how it would have felt to do these things with Lestat if he had been different, if he had been patient, if he had been kind.

And that irrational swell of grief came up in him again. He was mourning the Lestat who should have been there, he realized, doing these things with him. There was no such Lestat. He'd made him up.

He wished Lestat would be kind to him. Truly kind, instead of whatever this was. Now Lestat had pulled a blanket off the bed, and wrapped it around his shoulders, and led him to the settee which he'd dragged in front of the blazing hearth, and Louis had allowed it in a daze, not truly feeling it at all. 

He was so gentle. Louis was waiting for something terrible to happen.

But the fire was warm, and Louis watched it for a long time, listening to the sound of the dry wood cracking, the resin popping, smelling all the smells of the forest where that tree had grown, his eyes set with dull fascination on the dim red glow of the coals. Ashes to ashes. Would that be them one day? Lestat moved around the suite, talking quietly to himself about something Louis didn't care to listen to. Setting Louis's things to dry, he said. All right.

Eventually, Louis lost track of his footsteps. He'd stopped, Louis realized, his attention returning to land upon that fact. And then Lestat sat next to him. He was looking at Louis, awkwardly, apologetically, strangely, and holding his silk handkerchief in his hand like he intended to do something with it. 

There must still have been blood tears on his face.

"It's nothing," Louis whispered through a quiet stab of shame. "A vampire's tears. Meaningless."

"I know," Lestat replied, sounding helplessly lost himself, "but let me do it anyway."

Louis took a breath, nearly faint from the unfamiliar compassion, and nodded. And carefully, with the most uncharacteristic sort of delicateness, Lestat began to wipe his tears away. It nearly made him want to weep again. He wanted to protest—he felt flayed from embarrassment, and from the awful urge to lean into that touch and make it his. 

It only lasted a few seconds. It felt like an eternity.

Louis shut his eyes when he pulled back. "Thank you," he said, as softly and politely as he could.

"You came back," said Lestat. He said it as though Louis had asked a question, and that had been the simple, obvious answer.

And for a long time again, Louis was silent. His thoughts were silent. He wasn't thirsty, but he was so very tired.

"Tell me something," he said, eventually. It might have been an hour, perhaps more.

Lestat's eyes narrowed, and Louis saw in them a reflection of his own years-old weariness. "Never satisfied," he sighed, tipping his head against the back of the sofa, his long hair cascading. "Perhaps it runs in the blood."

It was an olive branch, the way he said it. Or at least it wasn't a no. Louis frowned softly, and folded his hands in his lap, a placid skeletal latticework. Had he always been so thin, or was it the color…?

"Tell me something about yourself," Louis said, and in his endless tiredness the words fell from his lips like rain. "It doesn't have to be important. Just something true. I don't want the sum total of my understanding of your soul to come from your arguments with your father and my own limited imagination." Anguish shook his voice; he shook his head. "Please. If there's truly no one else, then don't we owe this to each other? Who will witness us, Lestat, if not ourselves?"

Lestat stared at him strangely, and Louis didn't know what to make of his expression at all. Before he had time to try to interpret it, Lestat had looked away, his shoulders turned so he could face the window. For a long time, he stayed like that, watching the rain battering the eaves and falling on the sloping roofs outside. Louis wondered what Lestat could see that he couldn't, how much keener his senses might have been, and what he was thinking so deeply about. He was quiet for so long that Louis began to think he wouldn't say anything at all.

Louis shut his eyes again and tried to pick up the pieces of his dignity, hoping he could muster the will to get himself to his coffin when he felt so terribly heavy. He couldn't move. Could hardly think. His temples throbbed.

"I've always liked dogs." Lestat's quiet voice startled him almost as much as what he actually said.

It was such a simple statement. Childish, really, in response to what he'd asked. But Lestat was looking at Louis like he was trusting him with something that deeply mattered, and for some reason that look made Louis want to take him seriously.

"I've never seen you near one," Louis said.

"Ah," Lestat replied, affecting nonchalance now with such ease it was transparent, "that's because they don't like me. They must know what we are. Our presence almost invariably sets them on edge. It's a rare old hound that doesn't get its hackles up around me!"

"I've noticed that," Louis said, though Lestat had never explained it. It seemed only to work on some animals and not others. Why did horses, for example, have no fear of them? He wished he knew. No, he was too tired to find out. "Did you have dogs, before?"

"I had my own kennel," Lestat said proudly. "I trained them myself. Great mastiffs."

"You hunted?"

"I did."

"How like you," Louis said, a placid jab.

"Oh, shut up," Lestat parried. "It isn't what you think. I had a family to feed."

His interest was like a swimmer coming up for air. "Your father?"

"And my ungrateful brothers." Lestat paused, glancing away for a nearly invisible instant. "And my mother."

Louis didn't know what to make of that strange hesitation, only that it would have been a mistake to point it out. "The eldest?" he asked instead.

"No," said Lestat, puzzled. "The youngest. Of seven brothers."

And something dawned on Louis that should have been apparent long ago. It felt, in fact, as if he'd always known.

"Why, what made you ask that?"

"Ah," Louis said, almost amused, despite it all. "That just explains something else…"

"What? Louis, you can't keep secrets about me, what, tell me!"

"This. Your impatience. Your temper. The way you demand to be seen." He made himself smile a little, very kindly, though he knew it was probably incredibly sad, too. He felt sad, that was all. "You're an immortal youngest child."

Lestat looked indignant, like he wanted to start an argument and couldn't decide how. "My temper is in check, I'll have you know."

And that was amusing, too, and made Louis think with a bittersweet warmth of his own sister, when she'd been young and pretty and difficult for the joy of being difficult. He should have grieved to think of them, he knew, his poor dead brother and his sister who he'd never see again. But that grief didn't come. Perhaps he'd reached some previously unknown limit of suffering, and here, at the bottom of the pit, was another scrap of  _ something _ he could feel.

It lasted just a moment, but it was there.

"I know," said Louis. His smile was still there, and still sad. "You're very tolerable right now. I'd like to hear about the dogs, if you don't mind."

Lestat sighed. "You want to hear about the dogs?"

"I do." Louis didn't know if he meant it, but he wanted to mean it, and perhaps that amounted to the same thing.

"All right, I'll tell you about the dogs." And he saw Lestat's posture change, and ease a little, though he couldn't tell if this time it was real. "Now, if you've never had the pleasure of knowing a mastiff in person, you can't really imagine it, but I'll let you try. They're beautiful beasts, tawny and muscular and dignified and intelligent. They have an extraordinary presence, like a great African lion—" 

"You've seen lions?"

"Louis, don't interrupt. I'm talking about my dogs. Mastiffs, you see, were kept as far back as the ancient Greeks, and they would guard their masters' homes with the same bravery and devotion that they carried into war in Macedon. And mine loved me as loyally as any creature ever loved another." He grinned, and the thought struck Louis again that he looked boyish. "I let them sleep in my bed with me," he said in a hush, as if it were a sordid secret that he didn't at all regret. "In pairs. Imagine warding off the winter chill with those!"

"How big were they?" Louis asked, just to keep Lestat talking about something that made him happy, so that Louis might catch some brief shimmer of that light. He'd never seen him quite like this before. 

"Almost as big as you."

"We're the same size," Louis noted, which was nearly true.

Lestat waved a hand. "By some definitions. Anyway, they could stretch out the whole length of the bed, that's what I'm saying…"

* * *

It really wasn't anything at all, he would reflect, as he laid down that dawn in his coffin. He learned no histories that night—no facts that told him where Lestat had been, or what he'd seen, or how he might find others of their kind.

But he'd learned something. He didn't know what it was, exactly, but it belonged to him alone, and he held it close. Lestat, the youngest of his brothers. Lestat, a hunter, a provider, who'd loved his dogs more deeply than Louis thought Lestat could love anything. An orphaned child of a vampire, and perhaps the only creature on this earth half as miserable as Louis was himself...

No. 

No, this was delusional.

He didn't really know anything at all. What could it matter now if Lestat had been those things? He was Lestat, and he killed who he pleased and felt no pity for them, and his laughter was a mocking devil's laugh in Louis's ears. 

And what did it really change, if he was lonely, and afraid, and only Louis knew? Those things were facts, but only facts. Like how long mastiffs lived, and what Lestat had named those long-dead dogs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you ever internalized a fanfic as canon and then forgotten which is which? [Cesare's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cesare/pseuds/Cesare) [The Secret History](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16475534/chapters/38583872) has been such a massive influence on me that I inadvertently ripped off the part about Adam and vampire creation myths. I assumed I was just remixing lines they'd really said.
> 
> New Orleans fun fact time! The fire referenced in this chapter happened on Good Friday in 1788, and engulfed nearly the entire city. Lives were lost, hundreds more were left homeless, and most of the original French colonial buildings were destroyed, including the church. In the wake of the tragedy, the Spanish officials began reconstruction in the style that can still be seen in the French Quarter today: brick walls and planted courtyards and wrought-iron balconies. The new St. Louis Cathedral had not yet completed construction in 1794.


	3. September 22, 1794

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we hear more stories about dogs, and dinner arrangements are made between vampires.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter inspired fanart! See the end notes for a link.

"You follow the news from abroad," Lestat said to him the next evening. "You read."

Louis had just risen from his coffin. He'd adjusted his hair and his clothing perfunctorily, so that he was neat, and then wandered out the open doors onto the balcony to watch the evening crowds pass by and feel the mist roll in from off the river. He wasn't yet awake enough for Lestat's style of conversational jousting, and yet here he was, reliable as the tide, a familiar voice behind him. _ Not now_, he wanted to say, _ give me five minutes to enjoy the light rain and the quiet… _

"Did you ever hear the story of Marie Antoinette's little dog?" Lestat came to join him, leaning with arms crossed on the iron railing. 

That was right—they had talked about dogs last night, hadn't they? 

"I don't think so," Louis answered, mildly curious where Lestat was headed with this. France naturally interested him, and the ongoing news of the Revolution had long captured his attention, though he doubted he would find Lestat's political philosophies at all stimulating. Still, it was something. "Tell me?"

"I read it a few months ago, in one of those magazines you can't stand." 

Louis wasn't sure which Lestat meant; he doubted he would disapprove too stridently of anything he saw Lestat taking the time to actually read. He decided not to point this out.

"The story goes," Lestat said, gazing out over the streetlamps, "that when the royal family was taken from the Tuileries to the Temple Prison, the queen's favorite little spaniel Thisbé was with her. When her husband was put on trial and finally guillotined, sweet Thisbé stayed by her side. When her son was taken away and turned against her, dear little Thisbé comforted her mistress. But when she was taken by night alone to the Conciergerie, poor Thisbé was left behind.

"Well, not for very long. The loyal little dog tracked her beloved mistress to the very door where she was held, and day by day she would sit outside her cell with her head thrown back, letting out the most miserable howls. You had to pity the poor creature—and after all, what did she know of politics? That was her dear sweet mistress in that cell, all alone without her faithful Thisbé, who had stayed by her side this whole long and lonely year. That was all she knew, and that was why she wept.

"After about a week of this heartbreaking display, a certain milliner who lived across the street took pity on the wretched dog, who had become the subject of much local gossip, and she saw to it that Thisbé was fed and had a place to sleep at night. But as soon as her doors would open in the morning, the little dog would dart back out the door to resume her station. It wasn't long before the milliner's friends advised her that showing such obvious sympathy toward a royal dog was dangerous, and if she wasn't careful she would put them all at risk by association. By now she was quite attached to the sweet little dog—as are you, I'm sure—and so she settled upon a compromise, and sent Thisbé to stay with her sister until the execution was over and the dog had been forgotten in the neighborhood.

"Thisbé, as you might imagine, was inconsolable. She barked and howled all day and night, she wouldn't eat, and sought relentlessly to escape and return to her vigil outside her mistress's door. And one day, when the door was open just a crack, she got her chance. Out the door she ran, to the gates of the Conciergerie, where, joy of joys! There, upon a cart, sat Thisbé's beloved mistress! She was here!

"Do you think she could see the changes that captivity had wrought in her mistress's face? I do. I'm certain that she must have seen her white hair and the lines of suffering in her face, and she knew it all, the way dogs always do. But I think, too, that she must have been happy. It's in their nature to be that way for us.

"She followed that cart for an hour, her little legs carrying her through the streets, until finally they arrived at the Place de la Concorde. Thisbé watched as the cart was unloaded, sniffing around the feet of jeering men and women gathered in the square. Up the stairs her mistress strode with gentle dignity, and Thisbé sprang to follow at her heels.

"Not many heard it over the roar of the crowd, but the first sound to break the silence when the guillotine fell was the heartbroken howl of a dog.

"In an instant, a soldier's bayonet had pierced poor Thisbé's heart. 'So perish all who mourn an aristocrat,' he cried. And never understanding what it meant that she wept for a queen, so indeed perished that poor lonely spaniel."

A hush fell upon Lestat's audience of one. Louis was speechless. It wasn't the story, which, though skillfully told, was obviously nothing more than a dramatic fiction, sold to readers hungry for bloody and emotionally provocative tales of the revolution. No, Louis was troubled by what it had meant to Lestat. Why was he telling him this?

"It sounds like an allegory," Louis said carefully.

Lestat shrugged enigmatically. "Tell that to the dog."

Louis was too tired and thirsty for multiple layers of irony, but he smiled gently, not wanting Lestat to think it was his fault. "You have a talent for storytelling."

"Do you think so?" Lestat preened, and smiled like that had pleased him, and Louis marveled for the hundredth time at the way his curls caught the lamplight from inside. Like gold and sunlight caught in his hair, as soft as spools of silk. "But I wish I could just make you see," he said.

Perplexed, Louis asked, "What do you mean?"

"Some vampires have that gift. A knack for visions, you could say. Projecting thoughts, feelings, images, even memories."

Louis hadn't known it could be so, but instantly, he longed for it, as though the thought was heat itself. This silent loneliness he'd felt, this wordless choking torment in his heart… oh God, to have another person see!

"I'm not much good at it myself," Lestat went on, waving a manicured hand like it was unimportant, "or at least I haven't had the chance to practice yet. Not that it would matter even if I could…"

Louis didn't understand how it could not. "Because vampires can't read one another's thoughts?"

It was Lestat's turn to look bewildered. "Because _ we _ can't…" He stared at Louis for several silent seconds, shaking his head like he couldn't believe what he'd asked. And Louis felt that old self-conscious itch, that feeling that he'd disappointed Lestat again, and he didn't even understand how. "I really never told you?"

"Told me what?" Louis could hear the frustration in his own voice, the fraying like he wanted to plead and knew it would get him nowhere. A quiet despair threatened to overtake him, and he fought against it. "You've told me nothing of your mind. I can't read mortal thoughts. That's all I know. You told me it would come to me in time, but they're still silent."

Lestat seemed stricken. Had he honestly not known? "You can't hear thoughts at _ all_? I thought surely, by now—" He shook his head emphatically. "Well, it's the rats! It must be. Your growth's been stunted by a poor diet, that's all it is, we'll get you up to where you ought to be. But never mind." And he paused, for a moment, before repeating in complete disbelief, "I _ really _ never told you?"

Louis simply waited.

"Your thoughts are closed to me because I made you," said Lestat, after what felt like an unbearable length of time. It seemed as though this fact caused him distress—or then again, perhaps he simply noticed Louis's own. Whatever the reason, Louis could swear Lestat sounded nearly apologetic, and Louis fought against the urge to latch onto that apology and blame him for it.

"Is that always how it is?" Louis asked, feeling foolish and desperate and not understanding his own heart. "But why?"

"I wish I knew! I have my theories, if you like we could talk all about them—" But Lestat cut himself off sharply, seeming to think better of it. "Not, of course, that anyone really understands."

"You don't know that," Louis protested.

"I know it well enough," said Lestat, snappish. "And anyway, there's no getting around it." 

Louis tried to contemplate this fact, but it was almost too immense to approach. He looked out over the river for some time, trying to calm his thoughts, wondering what it was like for Lestat to be with him. What awful loneliness he must endure, Louis reflected. The world was full of fascinating creatures, and here he was, absolutely unremarkable in every possible regard, and silent to a depth he'd never known.

"Then," he asked, quiet and unhappy, "is it always fated to be like this, when one vampire makes another?"

"There's no such thing as fate," Lestat bit back. He was restless.

"You know what I mean. Are they always as troubled as this?"

"I wouldn't know," Lestat said impatiently. His mood to talk had disappeared; Louis had ruined it. "Probably. I've told you what they're like. You'd be their slave."

"They're all like that? Lestat, they can't be. _ You're _ not—" Louis cut himself off, uncertain of what, exactly, Lestat _ wasn't _ that made him any different. He swallowed, and sighed, and shook his head. "The capability exists. It must. You wanted a companion, not a slave, isn't that right?"

Lestat looked suspicious. "What are you getting at?"

Louis had a habit of working through his thoughts out loud, once he'd started. "It must be possible for a pair like that to coexist. Moreover, _ you _ obviously believe that, or why would you still want me with you? Why would you have made another vampire at all, why would you push me to accept our nature, if all of it was doomed from its conception?"

"I'm a monster, remember? I'm impulsive, irrational…"

Exasperated by this very old routine, Louis snapped. "Why do you do that? You're suddenly a monster when there's something you don't want to tell me. Well, we're cast from the same mold, and I manage my own instincts—why can't you? I'm tired of it, Lestat."

Lestat looked absolutely shocked by that accusation. It was as if he'd been splashed with ice-cold water and rendered unable to speak or move or breathe or even blink.

A weight settled around Louis's shoulders, as his anger subsided. Such incompatibility. And this was Louis _ trying. _ "Perhaps it is doomed. All the other vampires in the world…" He shut his eyes as he sighed. "I think if I were you, I would want a companion I could communicate with."

"We're communicating," said Lestat after a moment. He sounded gruff, defensive, but his face was so uncertain. Likely he was worrying about Louis trying to leave again. "What do you think this is right now?"

"Lestat," said Louis, feeling the strangest sympathy for him. Gently, he set a hand on Lestat's forearm. 

Lestat looked startled by the touch. He hesitated a moment, glancing out over the rooftops and back to Louis. "Come walk with me," he said. "The rain is letting up."

It hadn't yet, and it was foggy and cool and dreary down below. 

"Can't we stay here a while?" 

"Just a little walk," Lestat urged, "just up the street. I want to hunt, but if you come along with me, I might be good…"

It was blatant extortion. One human life for perhaps an hour of his time. Was the value really equal to Lestat? 

"You prefer my company to murder?" Louis asked, not sure whether he should be appalled.

"We can no more murder human beings than a wolf can murder sheep," Lestat replied. "They're not our kind."

Louis didn't like to think on that. "They were, not long ago."

Lestat sighed deeply. "God, not this again. Let's go, please, before I change my mind."

* * *

But Lestat didn't hunt. They strolled through the mist side by side, close enough for their elbows to brush in the darkness. Of course they never did, but the awareness of Lestat's proximity was enough to have Louis on edge. He didn't want to think about Lestat hunting, and yet it was the only thought that occupied his mind.

They took a turn when they came to the vast muddy square that was the Place d'Armes—empty of drills and executions tonight, it seemed—and strolled up the street toward the scaffolded white bulk of the cathedral. The building was empty, the workmen having gone home to their families hours ago, and gazing at the utterly silent structure, Louis merely wondered whether he might finally feel something for it when it was complete.

But in the temporary church next door, the windows glowed with the inviting warmth of candles. Louis felt some longing as he looked at it, though he couldn't name just what it might have been that he was longing for. Perhaps it was only nostalgia, like the yearning to be a child again…

And then Lestat spoke, and God was nowhere near his mind.

"I want to tell you about the first time I really met another vampire."

His words were like a thunder crack. Louis didn't trust himself to speak. To his surprise, Lestat looked calm. Or at least he didn't look like Louis had a knife held to his throat.

"I didn't believe in any of this occult nonsense. I still don't believe in half of it, or else I'd think it was a punishment for my hubris. Angels and demons, God and the devil, nothing but more superstitious trash." Lestat gave an elegant shrug of his shoulders, saying things he'd said before, only this time Louis was hanging on his every word. "Human beings invent enough horrors on their own. Half the time they call it righteousness. They need lies like that to make them believe they aren't the most vicious creatures on this earth."

"After us, you mean," said Louis. He knew this part of the routine; this time he would play along.

Lestat smiled sidelong at him. "That's right."

"So you were one of the new rational minds of the eighteenth century," said Louis, his voice betraying his subtle amusement that he should be calling Lestat rational. "A man of science."

"I was a man of truth," replied Lestat. "I never got as far as science."

"You told me the truth wasn't worth seeking," Louis pointed out.

"Louis," he said, rolling his eyes, "will you let me talk? The little village where I lived hardly had books, and I couldn't have read them even if we had." That got Louis's attention, but Lestat held up a hand before he could interject again. "Ah, no, I said don't ask more questions, just keep up. What was I saying?"

"Occult nonsense," Louis suggested. He couldn't help wondering whether Lestat was dropping these pieces of information so freely on purpose now, like baiting a hook, or whether he simply couldn't resist doing it once he'd started.

"That's right. I was telling you how I had no concept of the supernatural, no real belief that anything other than us might exist. And that was true even after I became a vampire! As I told you, my maker had explained almost nothing, trusting me to learn it on my own."

"And did you?" Louis asked.

"Well, of course." Lestat preened a little. "I was alone, but the world I'd been born into was new and wonderful. Everything was a marvelous adventure. I had Paris at my fingertips, and all of it was mine."

_ Paris_, Louis thought, like a bell ringing golden in the darkest depths of his heart. _ Lestat had come from Paris. _

In the shadows of the empty cathedral, Lestat told Louis all about the city he'd dreamed of since he was a boy. How the streets were so full of beautiful, fascinating people that even a vampire's stark white face might go unnoticed. How he would wake when the sky was still red, when he could hear the vesper bells of Notre Dame. How he would visit the salons and talk with mortals all night long, how he would visit the cafés along the boulevard and hold warm cups of coffee in his hands, how he could have his choice of boxes at the Opéra or the ballet...

"And no one knew? No one ever realized?"

Lestat smiled rakishly. "You know what a charming fiend I am."

And that was true, of course. But Louis had been thinking something else as well. Something he couldn't ignore no matter how the lure of Paris dazzled him. "You must have been lonely," he mused.

Lestat looked a little bit taken aback, and Louis worried that he'd spoken wrong again—but he shook it off, pretending it was nothing.

So Louis was right. 

"Well," Lestat said after a pause, "I had no idea that there were other vampires in Paris. Not really. I'd felt a presence watching me for months, but no one came. Not until they'd finally had enough of my crimes."

"Crimes?"

"They thought I was an affront to their kind!" He looked like he wanted to laugh, remembering it. "Walking in the light, strolling along the boulevard in my fine French lace, buying warm drinks and going to the theatre and dancing with beautiful mortals. It wasn't done."

"But how could you have known?"

"Exactly!" Lestat seemed glad to hear it from him. "I didn't know we _ had _ a kind; I had no guidance but my own senses, my own experience. No one had told me the standard lies."

"Which were?"

"That we were servants of Satan."

Louis let out a breath. He'd gone tense. Lestat made blasphemy sound so glib; Louis had to turn away from the church for a moment, out through the fog in the muddy plaza square. 

"That was what they believed," Lestat went on, Louis turning slowly back to him, "that coven beneath Les Innocents." Louis must have made a face, because Lestat laughed. "Yes, that's right, that's where they lived, can you imagine that? We're living things, we don't belong in tombs. They hated it, but they loved it, in the way that certain sinners love their punishments. A dozen frightened vampires dressed in rags, slaves to superstition and ritual, believing themselves to be damned."

"Why did they believe it?"

"Because someone had told them so."

"And why did _ that _ person believe it?"

"Because someone had told him! Those were the old rules, you see, passed down since long before anyone could remember where they'd come from. Lies had been their salvation. They really believed these things, right down to their souls. All the old stories were utterly real to them. They thought they'd been forbidden from the light, that crucifixes and Latin prayers and holy water would do them harm. Imagine how they must have felt, then, seeing me stroll right into Notre Dame herself like it was nothing!"

"Of course you had no fear," Louis said, unable to keep the wonder from his voice, "you never do."

"Why should I have? I didn't believe in the devil, and there was no God to strike me down for my blasphemy. So I did what I wanted to do, because I wanted to do it. Because it was good to do it. And nothing happened." Lestat gestured to himself with a sweeping wave of his arm. "As you can obviously see."

Louis was staring at Lestat in open awe, imagining it. Imagining him smashing all of that to pieces, the way he always did. "Then, you made them see reason?"

"I'd proven it all wrong; what could they do?"

"What _ did _ they do? What happened then?"

Rather than answering, Lestat tipped his head to the side, fixing Louis with a curious look. "They'd believed it for so long, what do you think? What would you have done?"

He seemed very interested in Louis's response, and because he seemed interested, Louis thought about it, quite honestly, for a long time. "I don't know," he answered, turning his palms up in a polite shrug. "It's hard for me to imagine that kind of belief." Wearily, he added, "I almost envy their conviction, for however long it lasted."

Lestat exhaled a bitter sort of laugh. "Well, don't. Without their illusions, they had nothing to support them, no method at all by which they could live in the modern world. Their coven master helped them into the fire, the infinitely merciful little monster. Half of them were killed before they fled."

Louis felt something, then, like a little earthquake in the pit of his stomach.

"And the rest? What happened to them?"

Something flickered across Lestat's expression that said _ don't ask about that_. A sharp and unsettling hurt. "That's a story in itself."

Louis frowned deeply, troubled by the tale. It made him think of Paul… and, too, of Paul's oratory, and how Lestat had raged at him for dragging his coffin there to sleep among the crumbling stones and vines. Haunting the tomb like his brother's ghost, Lestat had said. He tried to feel something for Paul now; he shut his eyes, and dug into that grief, and tried to make it his own instead of just another forgotten mortal sensation. 

Ripples, when he'd hoped to feel a tide.

He let out a breath, and looked back to Lestat.

"Did they find another way to live? Some reason to go on? Surely they didn't _ want _ to be damned."

Lestat looked at him very strangely. Again, Louis had the sense that he was being studied; was Lestat wishing he could read his mind now? 

At length, he said, "Don't you?"

"Of course not," Louis snapped, appalled, and surprised by the intensity of the feeling. He felt the spread of blood rushing to his face. "No. Never." 

"Not even when you came to me?"

Louis wished that Lestat hadn't asked that question. Alarm bells. Dread. His heart was in his throat, and he couldn't look away from the strange feline luster of Lestat's eyes. 

"No," said Louis again, softly. "You never offered me damnation."

Lestat seemed to smile without moving his lips, and Louis felt the urge to squirm. "Do you remember what I did offer you?"

"I remember everything about that night," said Louis. And he had to tear himself away, because Lestat's gaze was going to burn him up. 

Heat and heat and heat, and he was back in that room again, half gone with fever, surrounded by candlelight and gauzy mosquito netting, and Lestat was an angel, more beautiful than Lucifer before the fall. He would have taken his hand and followed him through the gates of Hell. 

Damnation and salvation—were they even possible? Could he be damned, could he be saved? Was there anyone above to hear his sins? _ That _ was what Louis had wanted. He had killed Paul with his arrogant refusal to believe that wondrous things could happen in his presence. Lestat might have been redemption, punishment, or simply proof that all the visions had been true. He was possibility made gleaming marble flesh. He had blown the trumpets and shaken down the walls around his soul. 

If he'd wanted to be damned, if he'd _ believed _ he would be damned, Louis would have taken his own life. What more perfect mortal sin for it? But when he'd looked into Lestat's inhuman eyes, he felt something else. The desire for more, to feel again, and live forever, and be surrounded by life and warmth and beauty and music and joy...

Yes. Of course he remembered.

Louis turned back to him with mortal slowness, feeling suddenly very tired. He rested his hand upon the damp stone wall as if to steady himself. "I need to know whether they lived, Lestat."

Lestat was watching him, and Louis had the sudden sense he'd never taken his eyes off Louis's back. "They did. They found a way."

"And what was that?"

Lestat shook his head, and his eyes were compassionate, his voice gentle. "I can't tell you, really; it's theirs and not mine. I could try to make you understand how it is for me, but even then, you might not really see. We have to find our own way for ourselves, that's how it is. It's the only way to survive this world."

Well, coming from Lestat, that was so profound as to leave Louis absolutely stunned. And as the shock receded, he realized that he _ did _want to know what Lestat's reason was. Tonight, Lestat had utterly intrigued him.

"I'll tell you another part of the story, if you want to hear it."

Louis nodded, and so he went on.

"Well, the responsibility fell to me to broker what peace I could between the coven and their former master. It was my fault, in a way. I hadn't meant to, but I'd shattered their lives completely, and now they were desperate for me to help them pick up the pieces."

"Had he believed it too? The coven master?"

"Oh, completely. Armand needed rules like he needed blood."

Louis felt the strangest flash of heat. "What was he like?" Louis asked in a rush, embarrassed at how thrilled he was to hear another vampire's name.

Lestat seemed to think about this. He grew contemplative, and frowned like he was trying to decide. He seemed wistful, cautious, as though these memories were more meaningful to him than he wanted to admit, even to himself.

"Naïve," he said, at last. "Contradictory. He had an aura of absolute power and authority, and yet without the strength of his convictions, he was as helpless as a child. And it seemed to me he could be thinking very deeply about something without actually feeling anything at all. Or at least not the way that you or I would. He did… he did feel, I know that much. He felt intensely." Lestat shook himself out of the start of a reverie. "He was hundreds of years older, perhaps that accounts for it."

"Hundreds," Louis repeated in soft wonderment. 

"Three hundred. With the face of a choir boy," Lestat said, with a strange smile. "He was even younger than I, when he became a vampire."

Another question burned in him. "How old were you?"

"Twenty," he answered, after a moment. He seemed surprised Louis had asked. And then he laughed, a little. "But I'm warning you, I won't hear anything about it. I'm still your elder in all the ways that count."

Louis shook his head. It wasn't that, he wanted to say, just that Lestat had been so young. He'd hardly been a man. What had he even known of the world before he became a vampire? Louis felt a pang of pity that he knew Lestat wouldn't appreciate. 

"You were saying," he urged politely.

"What was I saying? About Armand, what he was like, that's right. Remember how I said some vampires are more gifted with reading minds than others? Well, he was a master of it. When you looked into his eyes, you saw precisely what he wanted you to see. Impossible illusory landscapes, beauty beyond compare, and he was there, a hand outstretched, right at the glorious center of it. And he could make you love him." Lestat stopped abruptly, as if he'd caught himself at something, and shook his head. "Anyway. He could make you want to love him. He was very good at that."

And he seemed like he wanted to go on, like there was something Lestat needed to say and just couldn't say it, and Louis was quiet until he finally spoke again.

"He wanted to be my companion."

A thud, like the sensation of a coffin lid being slammed inside Louis's chest. And a strange sense of his perspective shifting, dizzyingly and uncomfortably, as if the ground itself were tilting wildly beneath him. It made no sense, this feeling, and yet it stole his breath away.

Lestat looked like a different creature, something absolutely foreign to him now. A man he'd never met, a different vampire.

A carriage passed by them in the fog. Louis wasn't sure whether he had drawn closer to Lestat, or Lestat to him, or both. He wanted to reach out and put his hand on Lestat's arm again and he didn't know why. Perhaps it was the sudden realization of the awful fragility of this thing between them.

"He's still living, isn't he?" Louis didn't say his name. It didn't feel appropriate. "What happened to him? Did he remain in Paris? Three hundred years old…" A shiver took him. "Oh, the lifetimes he must have experienced, Lestat. The centuries he lived through! Even if he knew nothing of our origins, even if he thought differently from you, how in God's name could you possibly resist him?"

Lestat looked anguished. Perhaps even actually wounded. Louis had made a terrible mistake. 

"Louis," Lestat pleaded, "you can't go to him."

He hadn't thought of it. Or, then again, had he? Because when Lestat said it, it didn't come precisely as a shock. He wanted to deny it, and yet he found himself unable to do so.

And then he thought: why should he deny it? It seemed to cut Lestat (and rightly so) that Louis would be interested in the idea of a vampire such as Armand might have been. Centuries of accumulated knowledge and cultivated wisdom, able to be shared and understood without a single misheard word. How could Lestat compare? He must have known. He must have felt that, too.

"He did remain in Paris, didn't he," Louis said, with quiet understanding. Paris. Where Lestat had been made. Where he'd met other vampires. Where at least one might still survive, and hold the secrets of their kind—or, God, at least _ some _secrets, something worth existing just to learn...

"Louis," Lestat warned. But Lestat was thinking of all Lestat had said, about how a vampire might live wonderfully in Paris, and stroll along the lighted boulevards and hold hot coffee in his hands and hear the ringing of cathedral bells… Lestat had done it, he'd proven that they could. So why not him?

In a soft voice, Louis asked, "Why didn't you stay with him, Lestat? Or let him stay with you… I don't understand."

Lestat exhaled sharply, and his teeth flashed. "Of course you don't."

"I want you to explain. I want to hear it from you." A pause. "I want you to tell me why I shouldn't go, Lestat."

He'd been wanting that for some time, really.

Again, Lestat looked stuck. It was almost pitiable. His maker seemed to have his fight-or-flight response fixed permanently toward _ fight_, the latter being utterly unthinkable; only now, with Louis threatening to abandon him entirely and his very existence on the line, would he work to find another way to act. It seemed he had to be pressed to his limits before he would behave like the human being he might have been. 

"You remind me of him," admitted Lestat, darkly. "Not much, not often, but in a very crucial way I think you're kin."

Louis stared, bewildered.

"This need you have," Lestat said, "to be led."

Insulted, Louis felt his face heat up again. "You keep me in this state," he protested in a hush.

"Do I?" Lestat drawled. "Or do you keep yourself in this state because you need someone to blame for all of it? I'm going to tell you a secret, Louis. You've never been my captive, or my thrall, or my slave, or any of those other lies we love to tell ourselves. I didn't make you to dominate you, you hopeless fool, I've hardly ever told you what to _ do._"

_ Yes_, Louis wanted to shout, _ that's exactly the problem_, but Lestat was very close now, turning like a flash to confront him. Louis stood his ground, but he felt the brick wall's presence clearly at his side. The window frames, the balconies, the gutters he could scale to reach the roofs. All points of escape he knew without reflecting, the way an animal knew the woods. He felt a quiet, steady fascination as he wondered what Lestat would do. Likely Lestat himself didn't know.

"You must see it. You have to know you did that, you put me in that position," Lestat said, his voice low and tense and tinged with desperation to make Louis understand. "You've made yourself my pupil these past years, and a disobedient one at that, and now you look to punish me because you don't approve of my lessons. Because you don't approve of _ me._"

How personal that was, Louis thought in his strange detachment.

Lestat was working himself up now, struggling to keep his raw and angry voice at a quiet volume. "I never asked, I _ never _ asked to be this thing to you. I never asked for any of it." Louis wondered what that meant, but Lestat was relentless. "You thought I would have answers? Well, I've told you all I know about what makes this worth anything at all! You demand philosophies from me and discard them like they're nothing, and then you have the gall to claim I withhold truth from you. Why in the hell should I tell you why to stay? You tell me why I should think you'll listen this time!"

Louis touched his hand to Lestat's throat.

They both went still. Louis was breathing just as a mortal man would have, shallow and fast with anxiety and a sharp thirst that had snapped in him like kindling. Seconds slipped by, time stretched into meaninglessness, and finally he saw Lestat's chest rise and fall, slowly, like he was awakening from the death sleep.

"I don't want this to be doomed," Louis whispered, very quietly, as though he could scarcely admit it to himself. He hardly understood what _ this _ was, or why he felt protective of it now. Perhaps it was that sense of possibility that seemed intrinsic to Lestat, that chance for some small miracle to happen where he was at any time. 

Lestat's eyes fell shut, and all the anger seemed to drain from him at once. He covered Louis's hand with his own, turning his face against it, and with the grace of a pair of dancers they stepped into the darkness of an empty carriageway. Louis's heart was racing, thirst making his nerves hum like the strings of the spinet. Lestat's skin was smooth and cool, and his blood was a symphony in Louis's senses, and he was overwhelmed. He thought he heard himself make some quiet noise of pleasure, utterly carried away by the unexpected intimacy of that touch against his sensitive palm.

The shocking sensation of Lestat's lips against his skin nearly undid him. It wasn't a kiss, wasn't anything really, but the realization of it had mindless need galloping through him.

"It's yours," Lestat whispered. "I offer it freely…"

Had he known Louis was thinking of his blood, or merely hoped?

"I don't even know what it is," Louis answered, aching.

"You do. You've always known. Communion."

"Don't call it that," admonished Louis. "Not here." His eyes darted toward the carriageway's arched door, where the scaffolded towers of the cathedral lurked just out of their sight. His fingers curled against Lestat's pale cheek. 

His cheekbones were so finely made, so perfectly sculpted beneath that skin like ivory. Louis drank in the sight of Lestat with his eyes closed, looking so exquisitely vulnerable and at Louis's mercy that his heart could break. Very tenderly, with deliberate gentleness, his thumb stroked Lestat's cheek, a slow and intentional movement that had the strange and intoxicating effect of fixing him in place like a pin. 

"You haven't fed," he said, softly. It meant a half a dozen things he couldn't voice. _ Not yet _ was one.

"Neither have you," Lestat murmured, and Louis shivered to feel his thumb toy with the buttons at his cuff, straying to the edge of the material and no further. The tension was exquisite; he longed for Lestat's mouth against his wrist. What did that mean, how would it feel, he didn't know, had to know, _ wanted… _

"Why is it so different with you," he mused aloud, "why was I content after I drank from you, and only then…"

"It must be some sorcery I've worked upon you," Lestat said, echoing halfhearted accusations Louis himself had made too many times.

Louis shook his head, mesmerized by the thickness of Lestat's eyelashes, how perfect each individual golden hair was, how pale and blue and lovely the branching veins in his delicate eyelids… "What is it that you want from me, Lestat?"

A terrible tension gathered in the muscles of Lestat's handsome face, and his fingers tightened subtly around Louis's own. "Let me do this." said Lestat, opening his eyes at last. There was a calmness there—no, a resolve—that surprised him. "Let me hunt for you. I've always been the provider." 

There was a horrifying intimacy to that offer, and it sent a thrill down Louis's spine that had nothing to do with his being appalled. His gut clenched, and his veins throbbed beneath his shivering skin. "It isn't that simple," insisted Louis. "To have you do the killing in my place…"

"Then I won't kill."

Louis was perfectly shocked.

Lestat squeezed his hand. "Just for a while. Just until you see things like I do." 

There was no mocking in that presumptuous statement, just a gentle, almost parental urging. Louis wanted so badly to believe him. If he could take that step, if he could only see the world through Lestat's eyes, then perhaps his tormented mortal conscience would finally let him rest. 

"There are beautiful things in this world, Louis. I made someone who I could see them with."

That nameless ache inside him deepened. 

"I wanted that," said Louis, a little breathless; how strange to be, when they didn't need their breath. "The night you came to me and told me what it was, how it could be…"

"It still can be. Let me show you, let me _ really _ show you, not with you half-starved and miserable and the both of us hating one another. If no one dies, you can't pretend to be appalled by what comes naturally to you. And even you don't despise me enough to tell me my blood tastes no better than vermin." 

A little pang of guilt at that remark, and a stronger pang of raging thirst.

"I still don't understand," Louis said, though Lestat was wearing away his inhibitions more than he wanted to admit. "But why do all that for me? What do you want in return, Lestat?"

Something flickered in Lestat's iridescent eyes—something Louis couldn't read. Perhaps he hadn't considered the question, Louis thought for an instant, but then Lestat surprised him with his answer and the thought was gone forever.

"An hour a night at most, that's all I ask. Not as a pupil, but as a companion. See the world, or New Orleans, with me. And in return, you'll never have to hunt."

Had Louis's threats of leaving shaken him so much? Or did this offer somehow not seem like debasement to Lestat, who never begged for anything, least of all Louis's silent and unhappy company? It occurred to Louis that this might have been Lestat's strange idea of compromise. Or was there a catch in it he simply couldn't see?

And Lestat still held his hand, still gazed into his eyes with tender intensity, still let him stroke his cheek like they were... what?

He took a slow breath. "My company is worth that much to you?"

Lestat made a soft sound. Amusement, perhaps. "It's taken you this long to understand?"

Louis still didn't, really. It seemed too simple an explanation for someone so contradictory as Lestat, too innocent for the history between them. Lestat's behavior over the last four years had been vindictive, cruel, by turns distant and possessive; yes, he had his moments of what Louis could only think of as humanity, but a simple lonely need for companionship didn't explain the violence of his emotions. 

But it was the closest to an answer he'd felt since he'd been made. 

He pressed his lips together. "I don't want to watch tonight," he said. The thought of it filled him with a whirling anxiety. Even if Lestat only took the little drink tonight—and Louis trusted him to do that, though he couldn't have said why—he didn't know if he could go through with it if he thought too much about exactly what they were. 

Likely Lestat had expected that answer. "That isn't part of the offer," Lestat replied simply. Louis was sure he'd wanted it to be, and he was immeasurably grateful when he didn't press the issue. 

"Then…" His heart was racing; could Lestat hear it? He must have, for Louis could hear Lestat's, a galloping liquid pulse that sang beneath his fingers. Louis moistened his lips with his tongue. A mortal gesture. "You know where to find me."

Lestat's whole being seemed to brighten when he smiled. His fingers tightened around Louis's hand, and his golden curls brushed Louis's fingers as he tipped his head like he was trying to hide that beaming grin. Louis had the wildest urge to tilt Lestat's chin up so he could see him fully like this, looking happy because Louis had made him happy. 

"Wait for me." He felt Lestat's lips touch his wrist, just for the briefest flash of an instant, and it felt like he was flying, or falling, the ground tilting wildly beneath him—and then he was gone so fast that Louis wasn't sure that it had even been a kiss.

* * *

Louis caught a glimpse of himself in the gold-framed bedroom mirror and flinched to see his cheekbones catch the light. He looked a horror to himself, gaunt and pale, dark hair loose and curling at his neck. He thought of what Lestat would say and felt a twinge of embarrassment, followed by chagrin that he should care what Lestat thought.

Companionship. That couldn't be the plain and simple truth. He and Lestat couldn't have been more different if they had been designed to be. What was it that Lestat saw in him that made him refuse to give up on Louis? Because that was what it was, wasn't it? He truly believed that Louis could be a vampire. A _ better _ vampire than the ones he'd known in France. He saw something in Louis that Louis couldn't see in himself. The capacity for… what, exactly? 

What qualities did he have that Lestat valued? He only ever insulted Louis's morals, his philosophy, his love of quiet places. He wasn't strong or fast or deadly, and he couldn't take the little drink to make up for his qualms with human life. And if he was handsome, if he was pleasant for someone like Lestat to look upon, it was in spite of himself. Vampirism had made his long face drawn and lifeless, like a porcelain bust of his deepest misery. 

The more he tried, the less he understood.

The hour was nearly midnight when Lestat came through the door. Louis's thirst had sharpened to a painful edge that dragged against his veins. Now, freshly-fed and glowing in the flickering candlelight, Lestat looked more impossible to resist than any mortal ever had. 

Perhaps he sensed Louis's reticence, his inhibitions clinging still. Or perhaps he was simply impatient. Either way, Lestat was with him on the settee beside the hearth without a word, and Louis was grateful that he hadn't had to ask. 

"You haven't fed," Lestat murmured, looking at him with wide and gleaming eyes. 

Louis shivered for no reason he could name. "You asked me to wait for you."

Lestat's lips curved. "And since when do you do what I ask?"

"When it's something I want to do," Louis answered, with a small defiant lift of his chin. 

"Oh, my stubborn friend…" Lestat laughed, and Louis felt a little surge of fear that he had changed his mind. That Lestat would mock him. He'd made a mistake, this was something foolish, why had he thought Lestat could want him like this?

And then Lestat's knuckles touched his cheek with such velvet affection that all of Louis's fearfulness washed away, replaced by a swell of desire of a kind he'd never known. 

"Come on," Lestat purred, "your supper's getting cold."

Louis wanted to balk at the double entendre, the flirtation so blatant even he couldn't pretend he didn't notice it. And just as badly he wanted to sink his fangs into Lestat's wrist. Louis grabbed at Lestat's other hand, not wanting to give up the sensation of fingers on his cheek. His grip was rough and shaky, though he tried to steady it; he thought again of Lestat's lips against his skin in the echoing dark of the carriageway, and almost drank him then and there. He heard Lestat's shocked gasp.

He didn't know what stopped him. Propriety, maybe. The last of his dignity.

Or maybe just the need to savor it. It was almost humiliating, how overcome he was, how nearly trembling with lust at just the smell of Lestat's blood, the hot thick pulse of it so close to the surface. The small tendons in his wrist seemed so delicate and yet so strong; a memory flashed, hot and sudden, how it had felt to drink there as a man, dying his mortal death and coming back to life in Lestat's arms. 

"God," gasped Lestat, his long fingers sliding into Louis's hair, dragging desperately against Louis's scalp, "what the hell are you waiting for…"

He didn't know.

He thought he heard his name as he bit down, and then there was nothing at all but the hot crimson flow of Lestat's blood against his tongue, and the feeling of their heartbeats locked as one, pounding and pounding, a rhythm that filled him and completed him. Blood filling his mouth, his ears, his chest, his loins, his throbbing fingertips. Yes, this was grace, this was forgiveness, this was fulfilment beyond anything he'd known… 

There was no room in him for misery. There was no room for anything but Lestat.

He made some breathless sound of loss as it ended, a quiet aching gasp that made Lestat pull him intimately close. He laced their fingers together, or Lestat did, and there was no time to think that he should be embarrassed to have his head upon Lestat's shoulder. It felt right that it should be there, that they should be embracing like this, their limbs a clumsy tangle as their heartbeats drifted apart like ships.

_ I need to know you feel this too_, he thought, and the clarity of that need surprised him. But how _ did _ he feel? Was there a name for what this was?

"Is it always like this?" Louis asked softly, without raising his head. "Between two vampires…" He licked his lips, and tasted the match-flare brightness of Lestat's blood still on his tongue. It seemed he had enough in him to blush.

Lestat's laughter sounded like church bells, like a symphony, like light through stained glass. Impossible, that a laugh could sound like that. "'Like this,'" Lestat repeated, mimicking Louis's tone, "what do you mean, 'like this'?"

And how could he describe what they'd just done? What it had meant? How for a brief and shining moment there had been not two souls in this room but one, and they had achieved a perfect understanding beyond speech? He felt his heart tremble like a leaf in a sudden gust of wind, and he wanted it back so desperately he nearly couldn't breathe. Whatever it had been.

He sighed. The silk of Lestat's waistcoat was smooth and cool against his skin, and he rubbed his cheek against it, not yet able to care how it might seem. "There are no words. I have nothing whatsoever to compare it to. That was an _ experience_, Lestat. That transcended any physical need for nourishment. There's something to your blood, or to the sharing of it between the two of us, there must have been…"

Lestat's breath ruffled his hair. "It sounds like you have quite a lot of words."

"It would seem I enjoy talking with you," Louis admitted to him, because the blood was working in him, and he felt something close to contentment. "When we aren't at cross purposes."

"Do you?" Lestat's voice was carefully neutral.

Louis made a soft sound of acknowledgement. He didn't want Lestat to be upset; he didn't want to move from here at all. "I do. I mean that, truly. You have interesting things to talk about, Lestat. And I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how charming and witty you're capable of being."

"I thought you were the only one who could see through all that."

"Is it all a lie?" Louis made his voice very light.

And for several seconds, Lestat didn't answer him. Perhaps there was nothing he could say. But his fingers moved through Louis's hair, and that soothed them both. 

"It's feeding," Lestat said finally, "strictly speaking." And Louis realized he was answering the question he'd first asked. "It has the significance that you assign to it… though I do know how you love to assign significance to things."

That was intentionally vague enough to trouble him. He couldn't tell what Lestat wanted him to say. And it made him blush again to think how weighted it had felt—how, _ yes_, significant, and was that wrong?—and how he'd wanted for Lestat to feel the same.

"You don't think it felt significant?" Louis pressed through his shyness.

He felt Lestat shift a little. "I didn't say that. I said I can't tell you what it meant."

"You must have thoughts."

"Do you?"

Flustered, Louis was silent. It seemed that neither one of them wanted to play their hand. Louis had already revealed too much.

"Let's not make a ritual out of it, Louis. Is the pleasure of immortal blood not enough for you?" He sighed, exasperated, but didn't move his hand from Louis's hair. And it was a balm, knowing that Lestat didn't want to give up this strange comfort either. "What will it take to satisfy this curiosity of yours? I swear it's as boundless as my appetite. I could have conjured up some voodoo spell the night I made you, you know, or had us chant some Latin mumbo jumbo. If I'd wanted to tell you what to think and how to live, I would have lied to you."

He rather thought Lestat was missing the point of what he was saying. Or possibly being deliberately obtuse. "Are you justifying keeping your secrets for so long?"

"No, not that, only…"

Louis could feel the tension spooling in him. He squeezed Lestat's hand gently, and it ebbed somewhat. 

Lestat sighed. "That's my answer to the question you asked before, all right? Why I couldn't take Armand for a companion. And that's why I can't give you any meaning in this life except the one you find yourself."

Louis felt a little sting of resentment at the comparison, and at the implication. "I don't want lies _ or _faith, I want the truth. It's certainty I long to find, no matter what the cost." His heart sank, and he felt the edges of this delicate contentment beginning to fray. "That's just the problem… it's answers I need, answers to questions that may have no answer. Doesn't that terrify you? Doesn't that trouble you at all?

"And what if it does?" Lestat countered. "It's trouble we can't do anything about, and there are so many other things we can touch and taste and feel right here and now."

Louis sighed, and felt that fear like a distant storm on the horizon. "Those are distractions, Lestat. The real question is always there, don't you see, we're on a bridge over a boundless chasm…"

Lestat stroked his hair to gentle him, as if he sensed it building. "You think too much. It was good, wasn't it? Let it be good for its own sake, without tearing it apart to find out how it works. You'll have time for that the whole rest of your life."

It was condescending, too blunt by half for Louis's softer tastes, but it got his attention. And there was a simplistic logic to it that was hard to deny.

"It was good," Louis agreed softly. 

He felt Lestat's excitement hum through him as if it was his own. "Then you'll do it again tomorrow night?"

Louis thought he might have blushed again, but he felt no urge to lie. "How can I not?" He lifted his head, and his heart raced quietly as he met Lestat's eyes. "I do want to be good at this, you know. To find a way to live with what I am. It's only that it seems impossible."

And Lestat looked at him so strangely and so fondly that Louis _ did _ blush, his cheeks and neck hot with Lestat's blood. He was utterly undone by the unexpectedness of it, and by the wanting that it unfurled in his chest. The thought that Lestat might kiss him struck him with the force of a musket shot, and he didn't have the first idea what he would do if that should happen; he ached for it as desperately as he wished the thought had never come to him. _ Please don't_, he thought, and yet he hoped he would.

Louis looked away, and took advantage of the comfort of Lestat's shoulder again. Words like _ cowardly _ and _ delusional _ whispered in his heart, and crueler, more deserved things than that. _ Servants of Satan, _ he remembered with an inward flinch. _ No, I don't want to be damned, but what if damnation is the only peace I'll ever know…? _

"You truly think there's hope for me?" asked Louis.

"Do I seem like the sort of man who wastes his time on hopeless causes?"

It was so typically brash and so typically Lestat that Louis felt comforted by the simple bullheaded familiarity of it. 

His eyes fell shut, and he let Lestat stroke his hair and let it soothe his nerves, and he willed himself not to think too deeply about whatever it was Lestat truly wanted from him or how much of himself he was willing to give in exchange.

"Tell me what Paris was like," said Louis, when the silence had stretched on for a while. "I've always dreamt of it, though I don't remember France at all, to tell the truth. I follow the philosophy, the poetry, the news…"

"I know."

"But when I pictured it, it was the Paris I'd imagined in my youth. Do you understand what I mean? My imagination was just the memory of imagination… it looked the same to my mind's eye as a vampire as it had when I was young. Isn't that strange?" So many things about him were strange. Lestat loved to tell him so. 

"Until tonight," Louis went on. "Tonight, when you spoke to me of Paris, you described it as a vampire would see it, and I saw the Paris that you saw for the first time. You made it sound so beautiful, Lestat... Tell me again?"

And for the second time in as many nights, the two of them talked until dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **→ [ILLUSTRATION](https://littlesmartart.tumblr.com/post/187515586602/guys-are-you-reading-tinderbox-by-emileesaurus)** by @[little-smartass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linxcat). Can you believe how cute this is? I can't. 
> 
> And so we come to the end of Part One of our story. Thank you to everyone who's made it this far. It genuinely means the world to me that you've read this many words of dramatic vampire longing. We leave our boys on a tense but hopeful note this time. Will this uneasy truce last? Can Lestat manage not to kill anyone for a minute? Can Louis admit to himself that he's occasionally kind of shallow? Find out next week on Pride and Prejudice and Vampires!
> 
> The sad dog story is, as far as I can tell, completely apocryphal propaganda; the oldest source I could find on it is from an 1886 issue of "The Irish Monthly" which claims an older French magazine as the original source, and that's as far as my internet deep dive could go. Another story says Thisbé leapt into the river and drowned on the day of the execution. I'm not 100% sure that this specific dog actually existed outside of dramatic Reader's Digest tales, but Lestat doesn't care about fake news if the dog stories are good enough.
> 
> Lestat's opinions regarding Armand are his own (or are they?), and do not necessarily reflect those of Management.


	4. September 23, 1794

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boat drinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gosh, this chapter inspired fanart! See the end notes for a link.

The riverfront was crowded and gritty and teeming with life. A man could find anything he wanted here, as long as he wasn't looking for salvation. This Louis knew from experience. After all, it was where he had found Lestat. 

Tonight they walked the levee as a pair, passing among mortal men and women who never suspected the predators in their midst. Lestat had gone out, and Louis had gone with him, because he'd told Lestat he would. Eventually, they would part, and Lestat would hunt. But not just yet.

He watched Lestat chatter with a man selling cigars, envying how effortlessly he blended in with human beings when he seemed to care so little for them. He was better at it now than Louis had been when he'd been alive. The conversation had started with tobacco, meandered through the summertime climate of Havana, and by the time they'd gotten on to the subject of the dangers of being ambushed by pirates in the Bayou Sauvage, Lestat had happily exchanged several coins for a tinderbox.

Lestat seemed to want Louis's approval, because he held the little brass box out so Louis could examine the delicate engravings in the lid. It was just the sort of thing Lestat loved best, a finely-crafted mortal trinket, something that had been made beautiful simply for the sake of being beautiful. After what he hoped was enough appreciation, Louis nodded politely.

The simplest things could make him happy. 

They walked a while longer, sometimes side by side, sometimes drifting apart. Though Lestat slipped in between gaps in the flickering torchlight like a well-dressed phantom, he was never far from Louis's sight. And as they walked, Louis fell to wondering once again what Lestat had been searching for here on the night he had entered Louis's life.

Eventually Lestat caught up with him beneath an ancient moss-hung oak tree. Hands folded courteously behind his back, Louis turned to him. 

"What brought you to New Orleans?"

Lestat glanced at him sharply. "That's a strange thing to ask."

"Is it?" Louis asked, affecting innocence.

Lestat scowled, and folded his arms, and swung his shoulders round to rest against the trunk. "What does it matter to you why I'm here?"

Louis was beginning to recognize this new pattern. It went like this: Louis would ask Lestat a question, and Lestat would bristle as if it were some kind of subterfuge. Louis would press on, his voice soft and his manner gentle, as though he were talking to a horse with a nasty habit of bucking. And eventually, when Lestat realized fighting would get him nowhere because there was no fight to have, he'd relent, and tell Louis things he'd never even thought to ask.

Louis couldn't understand where the defensiveness came from. What was he afraid of? Every time they spoke, Louis found he liked Lestat a little more despite himself. And that couldn't have been wishful thinking or simple charisma, because every reasonable self-protecting instinct in him was shouting at him that he should know better than to fall into that trap.

"If other vampires are as loathsome as you say," said Louis with an elegant shrug, "then I'm in no hurry to trade bad company for worse. Besides, I have eternity to find them, don't I? You, on the other hand, are with me here and now. So I would like to learn what makes you so different, and why it was that you wanted to get so far away from them." 

It was quite plainly an appeal to Lestat's vanity. And beneath his natural wariness, Lestat actually seemed a little proud of him.

"So," Louis said, as graciously as if Lestat were someone else, "what made you come to New Orleans, Lestat?"

Lestat sighed theatrically, and tipped his head back, like he could gaze at the stars through the branches. "I don't know where to begin. That's the truth." He looked back to Louis with a smile that seemed slightly sardonic. "When you're as old as I am, tales grow long in the telling, and the start is never where you first expect. It's like a tapestry. I'll pull a thread, and find a new connection."

The non-answer, too, was typical of Lestat. He was good at bluster and obfuscation, and now he was performing for an audience of one.

But before Louis could be crestfallen, Lestat went on. "But if you'll be patient—and I know you're more patient than I've ever been—and if you really mean what you said about wanting to know, then I'll tell you. I just need to figure out how. Does that sound fair, my inquisitive friend?"

Of course Louis was skeptical. But it seemed a reasonable enough request. And he did want a story. 

"If you really mean that," said Louis, "then yes."

Lestat's eyes gleamed. In one fluid motion, he pushed himself off the tree, and rested a hand on Louis's shoulder, startling him. "But I'll tell you a secret," he said, leaning in close with a sly, conspiratorial whisper. "I'm the only vampire in all of creation who's ever actually done it."

"Done what?" Louis asked in a hush.

"Crossed the great sea!" Lestat threw his arms wide with a wild grin. "They said it couldn't be done, but voila: here I am."

Louis gaped at him, astounded. "Then… we're the only vampires in the New World?" 

He'd long held that suspicion privately, but in his desperation to make sense of what he was, Louis had also considered witchcraft and voodoo curses. It all seemed equally strange and equally improbable. 

"Imagine it as Eden," said Lestat, his rich voice sweet with irony. 

Louis shook his head, pushing the jibe aside. The only ones... Then, no one else had ever thought to try it? Just Lestat? 

"But how did you do it?" Louis asked. "Where did you sleep, how did you feed? How did you know it was safe? Surely something must have raised suspicion."

For once, Lestat seemed delighted by his questions. His eyes gleamed, impish and silver-blue. "Are you impressed? It was easy enough, once I'd made up my mind to do it. The trick was booking passage for a coffin! You can imagine I like to travel in comfort, and it would have been a nightmare being trapped in the hold by mistake."

"Worse still to have the ship sink," replied Louis, thinking of his long-ago fear of tight spaces. Wryly, he smiled. "But you never think of things like that."

"I think of them," Lestat said, shrugging carelessly, "I just don't let them stop me. Fortune favors the bold, as they say."

Louis's smile grew wider and wryer. "And what does that make me?"

"The funny one," said Lestat. "Besides, what if it had? I can outswim any shark, and my teeth are just as sharp as theirs." He smiled wide to show his fangs.

"Not if you're trapped in your coffin," Louis said.

That wide, white smile turned a little bit mean. "Are you imagining a life where you were free of me? Where the ship did sink, and you're blissfully long-dead and rotting in a tomb?" Lestat drew his shoulders up, looking down at Louis like he was sizing up a threat. And then, like it was nothing, he shrugged. "Well, it didn't happen, and here I am."

Louis wanted to sigh with relief. A mortal urge. He held it back. "And here you are," Louis agreed. 

"And as for feeding…" Lestat trailed off expectantly.

It took him a moment to understand. Astonished, he stared. 

"Rats? You?"

"It's how I learned to live on them! And drunken sailors, too, of course, but only now and then. The rats, unfortunately, are a necessity, if you want to avoid raising alarm. And you do want to avoid raising alarm, if you don't want to be found out."

"You said I'm better at living on rats than you," Louis pointed out, remembering what he'd said last night.

"I'm just as good at it," said Lestat, ruffled, "I just don't like it. And neither should you. It's beneath you, and you're perpetually unsatisfied."

Louis made a considering sound. "And what about 'the little drink'?"

"Well, of course I didn't kill the sailors," said Lestat with a _pay attention you idiot_ wave of his hand, "that's what I was telling you."

"No, I mean…" Louis curled his fingers under his chin, reflecting. "Doesn't  _ that _ leave you unsatisfied? But you've always loved that trick." And just last night Lestat had offered it; he'd promised not to kill, Louis recalled with a barely-suppressed shiver, for as long as he'd drink from Lestat. He tried not to want it again, but the desire was there, like a strange sort of almost pleasant itch. "Is it because they're human? Is that why it's better?"

Lestat shook his head, in apparent disbelief that Louis could ask such stupid questions. "Of course that's why it's better. If you tried, I could explain..."

"You know I can't," he said firmly. "You explain."

"Oh, Louis, you're like a child sometimes." Lestat smiled again. "They're both a kind of torment, but that's another difference between you and me. You'll find any excuse to torture yourself, but I only like to be teased." His eyes caught a distant light, and now his smile was wicked. "And only for a little while."

Louis refused to let himself be rattled by that insinuation; he didn't even have time to untangle it. "You're so callous about it," he said, defiantly. "They're alive, the same as we were once. Why kill at all if you don't have to?"

"Spare me this old lecture. I told you, I like to do it. And you like to do it, too, you just don't know it yet. Come hunt with me." Lestat's lips quirked into a grin. "Or rather, watch me hunt."

There was a challenge in that sharp white gleam of fang, and tonight Louis decided to meet it. "Watch you take your little drinks, you mean." His voice was even, his manner polite; he clasped his hands behind his back as though he could be nonchalant, though surely they both knew the shape of this. "You said you wouldn't kill."

"I did say that," Lestat replied, his smile widening and sharpening Louis's hunger. "Contingent on your part in it, of course."

"Of course," said Louis mildly, though his pulse quickened traitorously at the thought. "I'm inclined to ask what I might get if I watch."

"Watching is its own reward, to some."

"But not to me."

Lestat chuckled. His smile became something sly. "You trust me, then? You take me at my word?"

Damn him. What kind of a question was that? Louis opened his mouth to reply, but he was caught; an embarrassed flush made his collar feel tight. If he said no, he had to watch, or admit his squeamishness was a higher priority than human life; if he said yes, he was admitting that he did trust Lestat with this, against all sense and logic. Either answer seemed unthinkable.

"If I watch," said Louis, closing his eyes in a vain attempt to recover his composure, "then you'll tell me your New Orleans story." He gathered his closed fist to his heart and turned his gaze back to Lestat. "Since it would seem both are inevitable."

"Then we have an accord," Lestat beamed. His expression was so fond and grateful that Louis forgot his trepidation altogether, and he nearly had to tear his eyes away again. 

It was so easy to please him! Louis only had to be the willing audience, and Lestat would look at him like that.  _ You shouldn't be so eager _ , Louis wanted to tell him, feeling suddenly and inexplicably heartbroken for him. This was his hour, after all. Louis was here because his company was somehow desirable to Lestat, and not the other way around. Didn't that bother Lestat at all, Louis wondered?

He led Louis back towards the crowds, to where the laughter and music were louder. The doors of a tavern were thrown open wide, and light spilled out into the street. Inside, men and women were dancing, and playing cards, and drinking wine in merry little groups. With a glance, Lestat pulled him inside.

Louis had watched this scene play out before. Of course he had. Lestat loved showing off for him; it was one of his favorite petty torments. But Louis had never hated this the way he hated killing. It was something else he felt when he watched Lestat take the little drinks he loved so much: a disappointment in himself, a yearning sort of envy. 

And a quiet, hungry fascination. Always that.

Standing unobtrusively by the door, Louis observed Lestat as he wove gracefully among the crowd. The music was joyful, and he danced with an enamored girl in blue, spinning her in a wild embrace and leaving her dazed with a kiss to her neck. He was gone before she ever felt a bite. A pretty dark-skinned girl was next, and Louis watched her fall in love in underneath a minute. 

He'd had his fill of two more before he'd finished dancing. 

He slipped past a card table, leaning down and sliding an arm around a young Frenchman's shoulders. Lestat bent close to whisper something in his ear, and Louis saw him do it then, the bite. That was  _ too _ audacious, Louis thought, with a hot flare of indignation… but no one suspected a thing, and the young man even thanked him as he left.

Good God, thought Louis, tension tying his stomach in a knot. Surely Lestat had had his fun by now.

Their eyes met across the tavern. Wordless acknowledgement. Louis slipped outside, into the cool dark shadows of a nearby alley. There, seconds later, was Lestat, and Louis was relieved when it was just the two of them one more.

Lestat bowed like an impresario. "What did you think?"

"They didn't notice a thing," Louis answered politely. He was observing the changes in Lestat's features that always came when the blood was working in him: the rose-pink flush in his skin, the way his eyes would shift impossibly in hue, and the way his mood seemed to lighten for a little while.

"Anything else?" Lestat was expectant. He was hoping for more than praise, Louis realized—the other half of their bargain, the reason for his hunt—and it was so earnest and boyish that Louis almost had to smile despite the pounding of his heart.

"I think my appetite," said Louis, "requires a bit more privacy."

For just an instant, Lestat looked startled, and Louis realized that he hadn't expected him to be so forward. Oh, that was too amusing, that he could still surprise Lestat with that!

"I should have known," said Lestat with a theatrical sigh, and Louis was privately grateful that he said nothing more about the matter. He would probably have given in rather easily, he realized, now that the will-he-ask nervousness was receding and he could linger on the rushing of Lestat's pulse, so very close here in the dark…

God, yes, he did want the blood. It was only a matter of time.

Lestat produced a folded sheaf of papers from within his pocket and tucked it deftly into Louis's hands. He'd never even seen him steal it. "For you, monsieur."

"What's this?" He looked down at it, skimming the black printed headlines in French. Today's news.

"A little light reading, for when you tire of my company. You see? I think of you."

"A stolen newspaper," Louis said, and tucked it into an interior pocket of his coat as they walked. "Wonders never cease."

"And our hotel, I've paid for that…"

"Remind me where that money came from?" 

"I'll have you know I won it gambling."

"Did you? How noble."

"At  _ that _ very waterfront inn!" Lestat threw an arm wide and spun around, walking backwards and grinning at Louis. "A lively game of Brusquembille that got wildly out of hand. I nearly won a boat before the wine got the better of the better part of the table. Do you believe me?"

"I believe you," Louis said, and he found himself smiling, just a little, at the force of Lestat's enthusiasm. He had a showman's charisma, when his mood was high. This was how his victims felt, wasn't it, before they knew?

They wove past dock workers and women and sailors in pairs and little groups, wandering the same as them along the wide levee, or gathered here and there around small fires outside of tents. A breeze from the river tugged at Louis's hair, and he gazed up at the black sky dappled with constellations, at the tall masts of merchant ships reaching for the thin grey clouds like spires. 

He felt Lestat's eyes on him, and turned. 

"Come with me," said Lestat. He turned as silent and quick as a shadow, stealing toward the empty ramp of a barge, and vanished around the railing. 

What was he doing? There were too many mortals nearby to call out—it would just attract attention. Louis had no choice but to chase after him, his own footsteps quiet as a cat's upon the deck. Half-unloaded cargo obscured a better view, and the sounds of waves and flapping canvas made him wary. 

But there was no one aboard, not to avoid or to hunt. For the moment, it seemed they were alone.

And there on the raised quarterdeck was Lestat, standing with a hand upon the wheel and another on his hip as though he were commanding the empty vessel into battle. He spotted Louis and bounded over as Louis climbed the stairs, and whirled for swashbuckling effect, his coat flaring in a wide red arc behind him. 

"Captain Lestat," he boasted, far too pleased with himself. "That's what you would have had to call me, if I'd really won that ship."

"You said it was a boat," Louis countered. 

Lestat shrugged. "Did I?"

"Quite loudly."

"I don't recall."

"I do."

It seemed to catch up with Lestat all at once. He stared at Louis, and Louis watched him work it out. 

"You've been  _ teasing _ me," he said in disbelief.

Louis let himself smile, at last, amused. "You said you liked to be teased."

Brusquely, he muttered, "For a little while…"

"What kind of boat was it, Lestat?" 

"Listen, you, you can captain a skiff." Lestat gathered up all of his barely-taller height and loomed at him in a comic bluster, and Louis closed his mouth tightly to stifle a silent laugh. "Mutinous, that's what you are. I'll have you hanged from the yardarm for that."

"Of your skiff?"

"Louis, I think you're obsessed with this. It's not flattering. They say things, you know, about a man who's preoccupied with size..."

And then Louis did laugh, a clear and sudden sound that he immediately flew to cover with his hand. He'd startled himself. How long had it been since he'd laughed? Good God, and over this. Ludicrous. Absolutely ludicrous. He must have been the youngest vampire ever to go mad.

He sighed, and shook his head in mock exasperation. Most of his hair had come loose from its haphazard tie, and he ran his fingers through it now to clear it, letting the wind carry the ribbon away. "Someone will hear us up here," he said, softly, just because he needed to say something. 

"I don't care," said Lestat. "Do you care?"

The way Lestat was grinning made Louis feel sure he didn't, either.

Now, he thought. Before he lost whatever mad courage this was.

"I think we should do it here," Louis said, very softly. Lestat's mouth fell open; his grey eyes were wide as saucers. Louis almost felt for him. "Before I see a rat, and spoil my appetite."

The joke seemed to jolt Lestat from his astonishment. "Flatterer," he purred, sarcastically.

Louis shrugged, a delicate lift of his shoulders. "You hardly need my help with that."

Lestat had no apparent second thoughts; his hands were already at the knot of his cravat. Louis was amazed at how quickly his attention turned that way, riveted now to the color of the moonlight on Lestat's pale skin, and the sound of the strong pulse he could hear there, always, even under the sound of the waves.

Yes. Louis wanted him. 

Or he wanted his blood, and he didn't mind that it was him. For right now, that would have to be enough.

Lestat looked as if he wanted to say something, and Louis waited, rapt, waiting for orders, for anything at all. But he only shook his head, and held his arms out for Louis, and let Louis step into the embrace. 

Louis's soul ached with questions.  _ What is this for, and why do you want it, and what does it mean to you, really? _ But his thirst was stronger, a humming tension, an anticipation that turned the blood in his veins to quicksilver. He set a hand against the side of Lestat's neck, mesmerized by the heat of it, caught by an urge to trace the tendon downward with his fingers, which Lestat permitted.

And when he hesitated, clumsy and uncertain of where to put his fangs, Lestat slid his long clever fingers into Louis's hair and guided him gently toward his throat.

It was like wine, like sunlight, like music and liquid gold, like all the things Lestat had ever promised blood would be. And beneath it all, a vast and nameless emotion so overwhelming he thought he would die from it, just from the gratitude of feeling it. Like his hand gently taken and clasped, and the voice of someone who'd always loved him whispering,  _ yes, I know, I understand... _

And as it faded, he pulled out of Lestat's arms.

The world was new again. The breeze against his skin seemed to sing, and the stars were a glittering tapestry above them, and everywhere, sounds from the river were calling. Orion had never seemed so bright. And Lestat stood watching him, an inscrutable smile on his face, looking as if he'd been sculpted by angels out of gold and ivory.

Madness, Louis thought again, and sighed. He smiled a little. "Can you actually outswim a shark?"

"I'll show you," said Lestat, taking him by the hands, walking backward as he led Louis toward the ship's railing. More ridiculousness.

"Lestat, I'm being serious."

"I'm exactly as serious as you are." He grinned rakishly. "Come on, let's swim the river, right now, you and me together."

Louis balked. "We can't!"

"Why not? I've done it. You're stronger than the current, I promise, and the cold can't harm you one bit. It's easy."

"For you." He looked down at the black water, and back up to Lestat, beseeching. "Lestat, I can hardly swim."

"_Could _ hardly swim! Have you tried as a vampire?"

"We don't come from the sea!"

"Aha! Not that you know of! Now this is your captain, and I'm giving you an order, and if you know what's good for you, you'll—"

Footsteps, on the ramp. Someone was back. 

Louis froze in fear. That was the way off the ship. Now they were trapped, and right out in the open! He looked at Lestat for some kind of guidance. He would know what to do.

Lestat, to Louis's rising horror, simply shrugged. "Didn't I say I meant to get my way?" And before Louis could finish a protest, Lestat had an arm around his waist and had leapt off the side of the ship.

They knifed near-silently into the water, but when Louis broke the surface, all he could hear was the ring of Lestat's laughter. He kicked his legs in graceless panic, trying to cling to Lestat, who quickly tore him off. For an instant, he was terrified—but he didn't sink, and in fact the motions came rather naturally to him, until his fear had been entirely replaced with outrage. 

And Lestat was still laughing uproariously. "Your face! Oh, Louis! You'd think I'd just killed someone!"

Louis wanted him to choke on river water.

Lestat began to paddle backwards with his long arms. "Come on, I'll race you to the far bank. And if anything bites you, bite it back."

And then he turned, cutting through the water as he swam, and Louis knew he would get nowhere treading water and shouting after him. The thought of beating Lestat senseless was what propelled him now, along with the knowledge that he couldn't well walk back to their hotel alone like this. 

The swim across took several minutes, and the current was strong, but Louis wasn't the least bit tired when he finally made it to the silty cypress-dotted shore. It helped, of course, that he'd arrived before Lestat. A full twenty seconds before Lestat.

And now he stood, watching Lestat clamber dripping out of the river, and thinking with some amusement that there were some things even vampires couldn't make graceful.

They wrung out their hair in unison.

"I told you," smirked Lestat.

"I won," he pointed out.

Lestat shrugged. "Then I'll simply have to claim the moral victory."

Louis made a sound of weary amusement. "Gracious even in defeat. This coat is ruined, you know." Louis sighed ruefully, though in truth he wasn't attached to the thing, nor to the money he had spent on it. Awkwardly, he pulled his arms out of the sodden garment, which had surely quadrupled in weight during his swim. "And yours is worse, you lunatic. That silk."

Lestat didn't seem bothered in the least. His mood was high. He took his coat off, hurling it into the waves like it was nothing. "I'll get a new one. A dozen new ones. You know how I am."

Louis folded his own coat in two out of some misplaced polite instinct. As he did, his hand slipped into the pocket, and touched something strange that dissolved when he touched it. He recoiled, only to realize he was holding the pulpy, waterlogged remnants of the newspaper Lestat had given him.

Frowning with obvious distaste, he threw it into the wet sand, and let his ruined coat fall beside it.

"Mortal nonsense," said Lestat.

And, despite everything, Louis laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **→ [ILLUSTRATION](https://littlesmartart.tumblr.com/post/187519029087/another-scene-from-tinderbox-by-emileesaurus) by @[little-smartass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linxcat) **
> 
> YOU GUYS. The very talented @[little-smartass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linxcat) drew THE CUTEST FANART for this chapter, and I'm just head over heels for it. I'm going to stare at it forever. Please look. Also, go read her fic "The Slow Path," which is a lovely exploration of what a mortal Louis and Lestat's relationship might have looked like; it broke my heart and gently put it back together again. All of my love. Anyway—
> 
> This fic does not endorse swimming the Mississippi River. Neither does Louis. (At least not out loud.)
> 
> Lestat's outrageous shark rant, as well as the end of this chapter, is a reference to a line in the 1992 script: "I can swim better than a shark. Would you like to swim the river some night, the two of us together? I've done it. I'll race you to the far bank." I love this irresistible dork.
> 
> For the historically curious: [this](https://picryl.com/media/moniteur-de-la-louisiane) is roughly what the local French newspaper would have looked like.
> 
> Huge thanks to everyone who left a review on the last chapter! Life got away from me and so did replies, but I truly appreciate you taking the time. ♡ Same goes to everyone else who's made it this far! The next chapter is done and just needs edits, so I'll try not to keep you waiting too long.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A week of evenings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, if you haven't checked out the lovely illustrations for the last two chapters by @[little-smartass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linxcat), please go look! She's drawn [ADORABLE FACE TOUCHING](https://littlesmartart.tumblr.com/post/187515586602/guys-are-you-reading-tinderbox-by-emileesaurus) and [SWIMMING THE RIVER](https://littlesmartart.tumblr.com/post/187519029087/another-scene-from-tinderbox-by-emileesaurus) and I've stared at them for five hours.

Now that they'd died in a terrible fire, it was only practical that Lestat should choose their new tailor. Or so Lestat had said, and Louis didn't care enough to disagree—though he did set firm limits on both price and ostentatiousness before he set foot in the building. 

"If you could only dim the lights a little," Lestat told the tailor in such gentle and convincing tones that the man was glad to squint through his measurements. "My handsome friend is too used to reading his poetry by candlelight; he's quite destroyed his eyesight, I'm afraid."

Louis blushed, flustered by the combination of flattery and mockery, and leveled a glare at Lestat when the tailor's back was turned. Lestat only smiled, of course, the very picture of maddening innocence—and Louis wasn't really angry with him, not in any serious way. Difficult to be upset when Lestat's clever foolishness had kept the man's attention off of him.

And thus Louis was fitted for more clothing than he truly felt he needed, though he allowed Lestat to talk him into each and every piece.

"A waistcoat in this brocade," he said, his arm hooked through Louis's, "and I think a fine long coat as well, with gold buttons to match, in the latest style straight out of Paris. Won't that be splendid?"

Louis nodded, not particularly caring about a coat, but entranced by the play of light against forest green silk, and the cool eager pressure of Lestat's hand at the crook of his arm. "Too splendid, Lestat. You'll have me in clothes fit for someone far more handsome than myself."

"Impossible," Lestat said, looking at him with a strange expression that made Louis feel as if the ground were tilting beneath his feet, and the only thing that might steady him was Lestat himself. "I've never met that man."

Louis shook his head, feeling heat rise in him, heat and impossible thirst. He wished they were alone and the tailor wasn't one back room door away. "You are that man," he said, low and exasperated, and felt the back of his neck prickle despite himself. This was beneath him. Lestat was obviously trying to embarrass him, and it was working.

He could feel Lestat smile, though he didn't know how because he was determinedly not looking at him. His hand slithered down Louis's arm like a serpent, and his fingertips were fangs at his wrist. 

"And a warm winter coat," said Lestat, and now Louis could hear his grin, "to match the one I ruined for you last night."

* * *

Their nights together after that first one were much the same, if slightly less aquatic. Lestat would go out on the town, and Louis would invariably accompany him for the requisite hour. And all of their outings, without fail, lasted much longer than that. It would often be the small hours of the night before the pair of them would return to their hotel, deep in conversation that never quite seemed to turn into argument. 

And without fail, Lestat would wait for Louis to ask him for the blood. 

* * *

Another night, they went to see a play. Naturally, since it was Lestat's hour, he had been the one to choose the show. Louis had assumed that it wouldn't be to his taste before he'd even learned the name, but he'd agreed. 

He'd also chosen not to point out that it would last far longer than an hour.

Louis had stopped paying attention to the plot some time ago. The lead actress was vapid and untalented, but not half as bad as the handsome idiot opposite her who kept on forgetting his lines. Watching had become unbearable, so Louis's attention had wandered in the dark theatre, taking in the architecture instead. 

His eyes moved over the arches and pillars of the little wooden building until the shapes became meaningless and abstracted. The space made him feel so impossibly small, like a child lost in a forest, stumbling upon a witch's hut. No, Jonah in the belly of the whale. The ceiling overhead was so high—why did it feel like the lid of his coffin? And where were the doors, why weren't there enough doors? Good Lord, he was trapped in here with these mortals, and surely they could all sense what he was, and any moment they would turn on him. A thousand mortal eyes, like sunlight, like holy fire, burning him to cinders. Someone was whispering something, no, they were _ all _ whispering, silent voices somehow growing in volume, chattering about him, calling his name, Louis, _ Louis... _

And then the gentle pressure of a cool hand covering his own. 

Louis whipped his head around to look at Lestat. A ripple of shame ran through him as he realized he'd been gripping the arm rest. He sank into his seat and pulled his hand back, trying to look unobtrusive and apologetic. How bad had it been, if Lestat had noticed? Good Lord, how humiliating. His stomach churned.

But Lestat had him by the elbow, and before he could gather his wits enough to lodge a token protest, they were in the narrow aisle and out the door. Louis's hands were shaking, and he folded his arms to try to hide it, but the anxious look on Lestat's face told him that he'd seen it. He dropped his head and stumbled through inadequate words of embarrassed apology.

"Don't be ridiculous, stop apologizing," said Lestat in that gruff way that Louis found so oddly touching of late. He put his hand on Louis's back, and Louis allowed it, and though it made his heart beat faster, it did make things somewhat more bearable.

"Try to breathe," said Lestat. "Sometimes it helps. I don't know why."

Outside in the street, the air was balmy; a light rain fell, and a breeze from the river brought with it the scents of green and living things. He shut his eyes. Slowly, he breathed until he felt like himself again. And being himself was never pleasant, but he was used to that, at least.

Lestat's hand was still at his back, and he did not want for that to stop.

"Thank you," Louis said softly. His gaze skimmed the street. "I really am sorry." 

"For what? The excuse to skip the second act?" Lestat scoffed, and Louis turned to him. "Really, Louis, don't tell me you were enjoying it. I know there's no saving your taste sometimes, but be honest with me. Wasn't it dreadful?"

Louis pressed his lips together, a quiet warmth fluttering in his breast. "The acting was just perfectly wretched, wasn't it?"

"Almost as bad as the singing," Lestat agreed.

"Almost." A smile quirked the corner of Louis's mouth. "I was dreading the inevitable moment when they would burst into song again. Which one of them do you think was worse?" 

"Impossible to say. Our leading lady was the more grating one by far, but the young man made me want to strangle him and take his place on stage." Lestat laughed, and the hand on Louis's back became an arm around his shoulders. "Come on, let's go talk about how much we hated it together."

* * *

On a clear night early in October, they prowled outside a mansion in the dark.

"Follow me," Lestat said with the grin Louis knew meant only mild and acceptable trouble. "I want to go inside."

"Why, what's inside?"

"I don't know, that's why I want to go!" He set his hands upon his hips. "What happened to that relentless curiosity of yours, monsieur?"

"That's different," Louis said without conviction, rather hoping Lestat would have a compelling reason for him to want to do it, since it seemed that they were going to anyway.

"Is it? Come on, no one will even know we're here. Listen."

Lestat waved him closer, and set a hand on his shoulder, and guided the direction of Louis's vision with his own. "Now look, but with all of your vampire senses. Pretend the house is one of your beloved candles," he teased, and Louis tensed. "Don't just see it, contemplate it."

It seemed Lestat was playing to Louis's understanding of things, and while he did feel a trifle mocked, there was something newly thoughtful in the gesture. 

Louis looked to the house. His eyes moved over the stately stuccoed walls, the barred carriageway doors, the balconies on the upper floor; he listened to it until he could hear the soft dusty sound of its bones shifting beneath the weight of time. And he tried to feel a connection to the people who lived there. And he did feel something. Or a particular absence of something. 

"There's no one there," he gasped, and glanced to Lestat. "But how did I know that...?"

"A mystery," said Lestat with a grin. "I wonder what else you can do."

Thrilled and confused, Louis's trepidation melted away. Eyes on Lestat, he set his hand on the trunk of the old oak that stretched toward the front balconies with their tall white columns. He looked to the boughs above him, a good ten feet above his head. "Can I climb this? I've seen you do things like that, but I never felt strong enough to try."

Lestat strolled toward him. "How do you feel now?"

Louis considered. "Stronger than that."

"Then let's find out." Lestat held out a hand for him, and Louis took it without a thought. He didn't lead him, though, simply held his fingers in a gentle grip as if he were a lady at a ball. Lestat's eyes were bright with mischief, and Louis was flustered immediately. "Have you considered our claws?" 

"We have fingernails," Louis said, disliking the word immediately.

"Call them what you like." Lestat stroked the length of Louis's fingers with a light touch that made him shiver. He had such sensitive hands. He'd never known until Lestat brought it to his attention. Did he know what he was doing to him now? "You didn't file yours down tonight."

"It slipped my mind," Louis said, wondering at Lestat's pleased tone. He seemed transfixed by the sight of Louis's hands, and Louis's collar felt suddenly tight around his throat.

"I love to see your hands like this," he purred, in a voice that made the pit of Louis's stomach drop right out from underneath him. A wild and yawning hunger lay beneath. "Vampire hands…"

"Lestat," he breathed. His heart was in his throat, and he could feel Lestat's heartbeat answered in his hand, and he knew how it would feel to draw those fingers to his mouth and push the lace aside and sink his fangs into his wrist…

"Shall I go first?"

"Ah," he said, pulling his hand back when he couldn't stand it anymore, "yes, that would be best. And I'll observe."

Lestat laughed silently, his silver eyes shining in the scant moonlight that shone through the branches. Louis took a step back, and folded his hands in front of him politely, and waited for Lestat to do it. He was always physically impressive when he did feats like this, but Louis had never watched with the intent of doing it himself. There was a fluid grace to the way he did it: he stepped elegantly back, and then bounded like a cat up the gnarled column of the trunk, along a heavy bough so quick it barely trembled, and then he was gone over the top of the balcony railing. 

The surprising thing was how easy it was, once Louis tried.

It was like the river again. The limitations had been in his mind, and once he cast them off, it was so simple he felt like a fool for never realizing. Lighter than air, he climbed the branches, his claws sinking into the wood as corded muscle pulled him upward. And then he was crouched on the branch like it was natural to be there, with empty air below him and Lestat's dazzling grin just inside the open balcony door. He looked so proud! Impossible. Lestat, pleased with him?

Louis nearly laughed, a silent exhale of wondrous disbelief.

"One final leap," said Lestat. And before he could second-guess his abilities again, Louis made the jump. There was the thrilling, unsettling feeling of open air beneath him, the fear that he might have misjudged the distance or his own strength and not hurt himself but _ embarrass _ himself, far worse— 

And then his feet were on solid ground again, and Lestat's arms were around him as if to steady him. Was he swaying, had he nearly missed, why was Lestat embracing him like this? It was over before he had time to find an answer, and Lestat was ushering him inside through the wide-open doors with a companionable hand between his shoulders.

By this point, Louis was rather numbed to the lavish excesses of colony life, having grown up in the midst of New Orleans high society. The interior of the mansion didn't interest him half as much as his own capabilities did, and he was still riding high on the thrill of having captured Lestat's attention. So he watched with warm amusement as Lestat touched the imported furniture, and ran his fingers over the gauzy blue floor-to-ceiling drapes, and picked up little trinkets and put them down just the way he found them.

Louis's interest wandered, and so did he, drifting slowly down the hall and taking in the sumptuous brushwork of the gold-framed paintings on the walls. At last, at the end of the hall, a door stood open, and Louis stepped inside.

It was a library. The walls were covered in shelves, and those shelves were filled with books. Some were old, ragged leatherbound volumes with the names too worn for mortal eyes to read. Others were so new he could still smell the ink. He pulled a handsome-looking collection of Blake from off a shelf, and was startled to realize that it was utterly untouched. And not just this one, he realized—there were others like it, dozens of volumes of poetry and philosophy and history that sat collected, categorized, and left to molder in the southern heat.

"Leave it to you to find the library," Lestat said from behind him, and chuckled. Louis was starting to figure out the difference between Lestat's mocking laughs and the ones that merely made him feel self-conscious. This was the latter, and Louis was too awestruck to let it bother him now.

"Look, Lestat." He held out the book, and watched Lestat trace his fingers over the intricately embossed leather. "The owner hasn't even read it. You see? They've never cut the pages."

"Is there anything more pointless than an unread book?" Lestat shook his head and passed it back to him. "What's this one you have your eye on?"

Louis opened the cover. "_Songs of Innocence and Experience,_" Louis read from the painted title plate, " _Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul._" 

"English," Lestat scoffed. Louis knew he wasn't fluent. "What is that, philosophy?"

"Poetry," Louis replied. "A new collection, it would seem. Actually, Lestat, I think you would enjoy Blake. He has a particular sensibility to his religious philosophy that reminds me of you."

"What do you mean?" Lestat looked caught off-guard, and that pleased Louis. 

"Well, his _ Marriage of Heaven and Hell _ is a refutation of the dualistic idea of good and evil. Blake suggests that it's that very dualism that prevents us from seeing the spiritual in the physical. God created the physical world in all its splendor, after all, so how can we place moral judgments upon it?"

"I'd love to argue the Christian premise here, but go on…" He had half expected Lestat to mock him for his enthusiasm, but to Louis's surprise, he did seem interested. And then he thought, why shouldn't he? Louis had been right about his tastes, after all. 

Pleased with himself, he quoted a part that he thought Lestat would particularly enjoy: "'The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God.'"

Lestat smirked in a way that prickled the hair on Louis's neck. "Now this I like."

Louis smiled a little. "I thought you would. The central idea, really, is that it isn't goodness that makes one human, but rather the complex opposition of good and evil within the human heart. That opposition, he says, is the source of progress, just as temptation leads to creativity. 'Good is the passive that obeys Reason, Evil is the active springing from Energy.' And so on."

"And what do you think about all that? I mean, I can guess, you lecture me enough about it all, but I want to hear it from you."

Louis made a soft, considering sound. Lestat's eyes were sharp and clear in the moonlight that slanted in through the open window, and he didn't seem at all like he would tease him in any way that actually mattered. He held the book at his side and turned to wander past the shelves; perhaps he'd find a copy of it here.

"I think his ideas are interesting, but underexplored. For example, Blake suggests that Jesus Christ broke several of the Ten Commandments. 'Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.' I wanted very much to think about that, but unfortunately I felt that it was somewhat weakened by his argument that therefore one cannot be virtuous _ without _ breaking the Commandments. It was flawed, ultimately, but philosophically intriguing."

"Of course you can't just say you liked it," Lestat teased.

Louis hid a secret smile. "Ah, here's another line for you, I think: 'One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.'"

"And what does that one mean?"

"Don't you know? It's what you always say to me." A wry smile. "Mortal laws are for mortals, and we're no longer part of that world, so how can they apply to us?" He hesitated, a sudden anxious flutter in his chest. "I would read it to you," Louis offered. "I can translate quickly. I've been able to since you turned me, actually. I think my understanding has improved, or my fluency..."

Lestat was leaning against the desk when he looked back, his eyes wide and curious. "You never told me that."

"I know." Quietly, brimming with nervous sincerity, he asked for what he actually meant. "Could we read it together sometime? I'd very much like to talk about it with you, Lestat."

There was a strange look in Lestat's eyes, something intense and piercing and hungry and almost fragile. Louis wanted to shy away from the force of it just as badly as he wanted to fall into those wide grey eyes and drown. His heart was hammering in his chest, and the leather of the book felt unbearably rough against his hands; what had he said, what was it now?

"You should take this one," Lestat said. 

He felt like he'd been caught at something. "I beg your pardon?" Louis shook his head, and held the book close to his chest. Take it? Just because he wanted it? "No, Lestat. We aren't thieves."

"Is it more noble, then, to let it sit here and collect dust until this city sinks into the swamp? You'll appreciate it more than whoever's presently not reading it. Lions and oxen and all."

Louis didn't doubt that was true. He'd already made up his mind to do it, in fact, when he asked: "But what about it being mortal nonsense?"

"It is, and I have my mortal nonsense and you have yours. And if a book of English poems can make you this happy, well…" Lestat shrugged stiffly, and Louis realized what this was. An apology without words. "I'll haunt the booksellers for the other one, if you really want me to."

Louis did have to look away, then, because he was smiling and he didn't understand why. He brushed a hand through his hair so that his neck would stop prickling with this unfamiliar nervous energy. "I won't count it toward your hour," he said, instead of what he truly meant, which was _ thank you. _

"You don't have to do that," Lestat said, in an odd quiet voice. Wary, Louis thought, that was what it was. "It isn't part of a bargain, it isn't anything, it's just something I want to do with you…"

"And so do I," Louis pressed, perplexed. "That's why I offered it outside our terms."

Lestat looked backed into a corner again, his hands gripping the edge of the desk so tightly that Louis feared they might leave imprints in the wood. Impulsively, he stepped closer, resting his hand on Lestat's arm the way he'd learned could make him calmer, if he did it just right. He didn't understand what he'd said, or why Lestat seemed frightened by it, but it distressed Louis intensely to see him so seemingly upset.

"Lestat? What is it? Talk to me."

"Nothing," Lestat rasped. The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him. "It's nothing, I'm all right." 

He plainly wasn't. Worried, Louis set his hand on Lestat's wrist; he tensed, but didn't pull away. 

"Breathe," Louis said softly. "I know a man who told me that it helps."

Understanding took several seconds to set in. For a moment, Lestat looked as grateful and as hopeful as if Louis had offered him a lifeline. 

"And does it?"

"It won't banish it entirely, I'm afraid. But yes. It helps." He watched Lestat's chest rise and fall, and Louis didn't take his hand off his wrist. He was afraid the contact was clumsy, but that didn't seem to matter as much as the reassurance it provided. It brought to mind the heavy comforting weight of Lestat's arm around him, and the touch of his hand in the dark of the theatre, bringing him back to himself. 

Louis tried to think of what Lestat might say if he were in his shoes. Something clever, probably. He would know how to lighten the mood.

"Now and then he does let slip something worth listening to," said Louis, afraid he sounded far more unkind than he meant to. "I admit that my pride may have kept me from telling him so." His fingers moved over Lestat's wrist, brushing beneath the lace at his cuff, sweeping back and forth over the gentle swell of bone. The ring on his finger was sapphire and silver, not half as bright as his eyes in the dark.

"You could tell him so now," said Lestat.

Louis made a soft, thoughtful sound. "Perhaps I'm still simply too proud."

He watched, feeling helpless, as Lestat shook his head and leaned back toward the ceiling and let out a heavy sigh. He looked embarrassed, Louis thought, and that was a strange thing to see on his face.

"No one's ever offered before. Reading something like that to me… with me."

"I'm offering now," Louis said. "I want someone to talk to about these things, I always have."

Lestat looked as if it was occurring to him, for the first time and rather slowly, that Louis might actually enjoy discussing the things he read. Had he really never known? Good God, Louis felt the tenderest sympathy for the boy Lestat had been, but at the very same time, he wanted to shake him. 

"You don't really loathe it all, do you? The books, the poetry… I've heard you quoting Shakespeare all these years. You thought I wouldn't recognize it? Of course I do. You're very good at it, you know, and I've always wondered where you picked it up."

Lestat pushed himself off the desk and took Louis's arm. The familiarity of the gesture sent a nervous thrill through him, and he was riveted quite suddenly to the color of the moonlight on his skin, as white as snow. Lestat's beauty had a way of catching him off-guard at times like this, and his composure always suffered for it. Louis didn't think he even knew.

"Let's go," said Lestat. "I feel the urge to hunt." 

His thirst sang like a bow across the strings of a violin.

* * *

Lestat leapt, catlike, up to their balcony, and for the first time Louis followed him with ease. Again, Louis thought he looked proud or pleased or simply fond of him, and Louis felt a dizzying swell of desire. Even he couldn't deny that was what it was. It made his throat tight, and his cuffs tighter, and his fangs were long and sharp behind his lips. 

He was thirsty, and Lestat was beautiful. And those two thoughts were not in competition, but in harmony. 

The lamps were still lit in their rooms, but they lingered outside for a moment. The shutters made the light fall strangely on Lestat's smooth cheeks, like the stripes of a tiger, and again he felt transfixed, hypnotized, caught up simply looking at him. A silent question burned in his eyes, and aching, Louis nodded and stepped into his embrace, his book set neatly on a chair.

He craved the ritual, to tell the truth. Lestat's fingers parting the waves of his hair; his heartbeat thudding in his chest and in his throat; his breath catching as Louis's lips brushed his skin, not quite a kiss but almost; the seconds Louis would make him wait, until he felt Lestat tremble and make that low sound in his chest that Louis couldn't resist at all.

He was always gentle, when he drove his fangs into Lestat's throat. He didn't want to lose himself before the blood swoon took him; he didn't want to hurt Lestat, even if it wouldn't truly matter afterward. And it was impossible to deny that Lestat enjoyed it, too. Louis had tried to find another explanation, but the simplest one was fact: Lestat didn't try to hide the way he longed for Louis's fangs in his throat. Lestat felt _ pleasure _ when Louis drank from him, and knowing that made Louis burn like nothing else. 

His body was a drowsy weight leaning against Lestat's chest when he finally came back to himself. Lestat's back was against the wall, just beside the doorway, and he was breathing deep and slow. Louis mouthed at his throat, sucking at the last drops from the healing wound. _ This is a kiss_, he thought, and he realized quietly that it had always been.

Lestat was talking, he realized, and stroking his hair very gently. Quoting some poetry—oh, oh God, it was Shakespeare—in a soft, unmistakeably adoring voice that made his heart clench in his chest.

"And when he shall die,  
Take him and cut him out in little stars,  
And he will make the face of heaven so fine  
That all the world will be in love with night  
And pay no worship to the garish sun."

A flood of heat. 

Desire for—what? What did he want, what was the shape of this need?

It didn't make sense. Or it didn't make sense that it was happening to him, or that Lestat was saying those words. The obvious things it meant were meant for someone else, some Juliet—and God, he was a man, and so was Lestat, even if no woman had ever been as beautiful as him. 

It should have felt like damnation, he would reflect later. Instead it had felt like a miracle he couldn't quite believe in.

He pulled away to look up at Lestat, marveling again at his incomparable beauty. God, had he always looked at Louis like this? He'd seen this softness in his eyes before, but when?

"You knew all along, didn't you, about the library? You brought me there on purpose, you'd already been inside, you wanted me to have something..." 

Could he see the desperation Louis felt? If it was going to happen, he needed it to happen. He needed Lestat to kiss him, if it was true, if somehow they had both been wanting it. He felt an old familiar longing: to either be set free or fall completely. _ Tell me I'm not alone in this_, he thought again.

Lestat's warm hand took his own, pressed palm to palm, and held it to his heart, and Louis searched his face for what it meant. Was that hope in his eyes? Would he have recognized hope, coming from Lestat?

"If I profane with my unworthiest hand," Lestat quoted, "this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand, to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss."

Louis felt a nervousness so keen it nearly made him dizzy. He knew this scene… but how did he remember all the lines? It had been years since he'd seen the play. But there were the words, springing to his mind with the same clarity as the day he'd first heard them performed. Vampire memory.

And Lestat was awaiting his answer.

It was hard to hold Lestat's gaze. It seemed to burn right through him, searing away every illusion he'd ever had about not wanting this and laying him bare to himself. 

"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this." Louis held Lestat's hand tighter in his own, and felt his fingers tense. "For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."

Lestat let out a little breath; his lips quirked into an impish smile. "Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?"

Louis felt his cheeks flush, and ducked his head, though his eyes never left Lestat's. His nerves were humming as he softly returned Lestat's smile. "Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer."

"O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They pray." Lestat leaned close; the tip of his nose brushed the sharp ridge of Louis's cheekbone, and Louis tipped his chin up, his eyes fluttering shut unbidden. His breath was soft against Louis's ear, and his golden hair was even softer. And underneath it all, the flirtation and the seduction that made Louis want to melt against him like he'd never done with anyone before—underneath that, Louis could sense a current of tension that reminded him of how Lestat trembled right before Louis sank his fangs into him. How he seemed to need it just as much as Louis. "Grant thou," he breathed, "lest faith turn to despair."

"Saints do not move," Louis whispered, not daring to open his eyes, "though grant for prayers' sake."

Lestat smiled; Louis felt his lips curve against his cheek. "Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take."

Lestat's lips were exquisitely soft. It was all he could think about, as much as he could think about anything as his thoughts gave way to bliss: how soft his lips were, how strange it was that two deadly predators should be able to kiss each other like this. 

It lasted seconds. Seconds, for his first kiss in years, his first kiss with a man, his first kiss since he'd died. 

He blinked like he was waking from his sleep, and there was Lestat, so close, grinning so brightly it made his eyes seem to sparkle—and was it his imagination, or was Lestat flushed very softly pink as well?

He lifted Louis's fingers to his lips, and kissed his knuckles one by one, like Louis was a precious fragile thing. His heart ached in the confines of his ribs. "Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged."

It was all he could do to remember his lines. It wasn't hard to sound breathless and dazed—he'd never felt like this. "Then have my lips the sin that they have took."

"Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!" Lestat laughed, and silently so did Louis. He wrapped an arm around Louis's waist and pulled him close, and Louis gladly melted against him. "Give me my sin again."

"You kiss by the book," Louis laughed, his heart pounding sweetly.

Whether he moved first or Lestat did, he couldn't have said. Perhaps they met in the middle. 

And in a sweet and wondrous blur, they were inside on the sofa, entwined in one another. He couldn't stop thinking, couldn't stop noticing things. Lestat's palms were on Louis's cheeks, his fingers sliding back into Louis's hair, nails curling gently against his scalp and making him shiver. Their noses brushed as Lestat held him there, kissing him like that for a sweet eternity, driving Louis exquisitely mad each time he would take one of Louis's lips between his own and let him feel the points of his fangs in a slow drag that made the hair raise on Louis's neck and arms. 

He wanted to say so many things. That no one had ever kissed him like this before and he needed it never to stop. That he didn't know how to do this with another man, not really; that he'd known it would be different, but he didn't know it would feel like this, like he'd been holding himself back for his whole life. He wanted to say he'd been waiting years just to touch him, that he'd known but he just hadn't realized…

If Lestat thought Louis's hands were clumsy, if his lack of experience was obvious, Lestat never let on. Louis was quietly grateful for it, and slowly he gained the courage to touch Lestat the way he pleased, spreading his hands against his broad shoulders and his strong chest and feeling the contrast between firm muscle and the brocade of his expensive silk waistcoat. He could have gotten lost in that, and nearly did, but then Lestat made a low noise in his chest that rumbled like thunder, and in an instant Louis had pressed against him with an arm wrapped tight around his shoulders.

Lestat fell back and pulled Louis to recline against him, and for a moment the dizzying totality of it was too much; he broke from the kiss, breathing in quick shallow gasps. He wet his lips with his tongue, and felt Lestat groan.

"If you're about to ask me what this means, _ mon cher_," breathed Lestat, stroking his cheeks with his thumbs and kissing the corners of his mouth, "I think I'll actually cry."

"No," Louis gasped quietly, "only…" It hard to find his words when Lestat's clever mouth was at his jaw, opening up chasms of wanting within him. Dizzying, those little kisses, those gentle touches of his hands. Was he really so easily bought? He must have been, for he found himself leaning into Lestat's palm, tipping his chin up so he could be kissed again. "Only I didn't realize… or I didn't know there was anything _ to _ realize… and you never said anything, why didn't you say anything?"

"Don't ask stupid questions," Lestat warned, and kissed him again.

Perhaps he _ didn't _ understand. Louis struggled to imagine Lestat holding himself back from anything he truly desired. Perhaps this was a whim. An indulgence. Perhaps it was just that there was no one else, was that it? 

"I can't stop thinking," Louis whispered, his eyes shut in a mixture of pleasure and apology. He'd gotten a fistful of Lestat's hair wound up in his fingers, and he held his hand firmly there now, as if it might be enough to keep Lestat from pulling away. As if Lestat could pull away like this, trapped beneath him—but the fear was there.

Lestat let out a sigh that sounded frustrated, but when he kissed Louis again it was so tender and so affectionate that Louis nearly wanted to weep. "You're always thinking." His lips brushed Louis's cheek. "What is it now?"

"Everything." Louis's voice was a desperate whisper. "This, your kindness, _ you_…"

"I'm not kind," Lestat answered sharply, and pressed his mouth to the delicate patch of skin beneath Louis's ear until Louis gasped and twisted against him. 

Louis made some pathetically needy sound in the back of his throat and clutched at hungry fistfuls of Lestat's hair and shirtsleeve, as overwhelmed as an untouched virgin would have been. Stupidly, he wanted to argue that Lestat _ had _ been kind tonight, that he could be so charming and so eloquent and so thoughtful when he wanted to be, and it was only inexplicable monstrous stubbornness that made them treat each other the way they had, surely he could see that...

But Lestat's fangs were a searing brand high on his throat, and Louis craned his neck back with a moan that startled him. Do it, he thought wordlessly, every sense attuned to that point of contact, where his pulse beat like it wanted to leap into Lestat's waiting mouth. Kindness seemed to matter not at all, not when Lestat's mouth was the hottest thing he'd ever felt.

"Show me, then," said Louis, his voice stretched thin with need, "show me what you really are…"

Lestat made a noise against his skin, something low and feral-sounding that made his chest rumble when Louis arched against him; Louis throbbed from his scalp to the tips of his toes and exhaled sharply, fingers going tight in Lestat's hair. He was drunk on kisses, he wanted Lestat's hands on his skin, Lestat's fangs in his throat, why wasn't he… why…

It struck him that perhaps he was making a fool of himself, and the exchange of blood only worked one way. Perhaps all his wanting amounted to nothing, and he would have to find some other way to deal with the tension winding tight around his nerves. 

Or perhaps— 

Perhaps Lestat just didn't want him like _ that_.

"Is this what you wanted," Lestat murmured, and the movement of his lips made Louis's thighs tense, "the night I came to you?"

Heat flooded him then, a rush of arousal and embarrassment and need and indignation that had him shifting atop Lestat, their legs a graceless tangle, gripping his golden hair and clutching at his fine silk clothes like that could be enough to tell him _ yes_. And he _ felt _ Lestat smile, the curve of Lestat's lips against his neck, and Christ, Louis didn't have words for all the things he needed him to do.

"You're the one who can read thoughts," said Louis breathlessly, his gasps making Lestat's golden hair move, "you must know what I wanted…"

"Better than you knew yourself?"

Slowly, maddeningly slowly, slowly enough that it must have been deliberate and meant entirely to torture him, Lestat was undoing the tie at Louis's throat. He trembled, and he knew Lestat could feel it, and he tried not to care. 

"Yes," he admitted quietly, stubbornly not giving Lestat the protest he was after. "I didn't know what any of it meant. I only knew I wanted you." 

Lestat's hands faltered; Louis felt him tense. Anticipation made his stomach tight, and he lifted his fingers to Lestat's cheek, suddenly aching to look at his face. Lestat's eyelashes touched his cheek, his nose brushed Louis's jaw, and Louis tipped his chin back, offering himself wordlessly. 

And again, Lestat kissed him there, but didn't bite. The shiver that ran through him felt like lightning.

"Do you still want me?" Lestat whispered. His mouth was like cool velvet at the pulse point in Louis's throat.

"More than ever," Louis sighed. Lestat's arm was around his waist, holding him close. He felt safe, and sated, and desired, and warm; out on the balcony there was a book that they would read together… yes, yes, he wanted this, he wanted Lestat. He'd never known how much.

Lestat kissed his throat again. "Will you still want me tomorrow?"

He felt something give way inside his chest. His pulse throbbed in his fingertips, his face, his legs, everywhere Lestat was pressed against him. He drew back to look at him, one hand braced against Lestat's chest for leverage; Lestat grasped Louis's other hand and brought it to his lips immediately, and there was something terribly vulnerable in the gesture. It was as though Lestat needed some physical barrier between himself and Louis, even if it was only Louis's hand. 

And God, the way Lestat was looking at him! Like he held Lestat's heart in the palm of his hand. When their eyes met, something unfurled deep in Louis's stomach, some confused mix of hunger and desire that made his face flush hot with Lestat's blood. 

He didn't know what to say. 

He couldn't bear to hurt him.

Slowly, Louis leaned in to kiss him again, relishing the silent little intake of breath that he could feel in Lestat's chest beneath his own. The way his strong fingers flexed against Louis's. The way his lips parted, so he couldn't tell who was leading who. Oh, he'd never seen the point of kissing before, but he could have done just this for hours with Lestat…

"Tomorrow," Louis said very softly, "I want to read to you."

For an instant he was sure that he smelled blood, which made no sense. And then Lestat's mouth was open to him, and Louis was lost in a deep and heated kiss that left him breathless and mindless. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I remember reading about an early draft of _Interview_ where Louis was initially seduced in part by Lestat's love of Shakespeare, which honestly makes so much sense for both of them that I'm constantly sad that there's never been much inkling of it anywhere else in the series. They're both such bookworms! Anyway, I wanted to touch on that here. 
> 
> Lestat's dodgy 1790s English is a bit of headcanon on my part, but he says in TVL that he learned from flatboatmen and detective novels (I love this nerd) so I ran with it. I suspect he knows enough to get by and can use mind reading for the rest, and he can clearly quote poetry just fine, but if he was pressed he'd be a bit embarrassed. Luckily, Louis is extending an invitation instead of pointing out a weakness. Slow progress.


End file.
